IV-FROM A REPUBLICAN

You ask me to state the general principles which should govern the members of the New York Constitutional, Convention in determining what should be incorporated in the new instrument, particularly in reference to the duties, powers, and responsibilities of the Legislature and the Executive.

The New York State Constitution, in common with other State constitutions and the Federal Constitution, performs two distinct but closely connected functions. Primarily it prescribes the form of the State government and the functions of its several parts. In that respect, and stripped of technical phraseology, it may be fairly considered analogous to the skeleton of the human body, around and within which legislative acts, local ordinances, and court decisions will construct the living, operating tissue of the government of the State and its local subdivisions. Of equal importance, the Constitution establishes in its Bill of Rights the protection to which each individual inhabitant of the State is entitled against all the rest. It defines the irreducible minimum of the rights of the minority against the will of the majority, however large. It leaves, and should leave, to that majority the procedure under which the civic life of the State continues.

Prohibitory Constitutional provisions limiting the action of the Legislature, or regarding private or local bills, or governing the creation of a State debt, or protecting the wild forest lands of the State, while designed to protect the people of the State as a whole against hasty or corrupt legislative action, are inherently part of the plan or skeleton of the State government. Several State constitutions adopted in comparatively recent years so multiplied provisions of the character just

mentioned that the primary purpose of the instrument was entirely obscured. Fortunately in this State there is little present evidence of such an unreasoning public distrust of the Legislature. For the people unduly to restrain the action of their chosen legislative representatives is to render ineffective the mobile part of government represented in legislative enactments.

The strength of the Federal Constitution is in the breadth of its general principles and the small number of fundamentals enunciated. Constitutional amendments should represent the growth through periods of constructive thought which have merged into finally accepted forms and procedures.

In the adoption of a new Constitution we must consider, not only its primary functions, but the history of the essentials of our present Constitution. Every school-boy knows, or should, that the safeguards which surround the individual have come with no essential change from the days of the Magna Charta and the English Bill of Rights, and that their principles are woven into the very fabric of our institutions. It is sufficient to note that in all essentials our present Constitution reproduces the Constitution of 1846. We may expect the Convention now in session to continue the framework of our Government substantially unaltered.

It is not sufficient for the new Constitution to restate individual rights in words already familiar, and merely to re-enact in broad outline a plan of government essentially identical with those plans which have preceded it. We must deal with the political problems of this generation as preceding generations dealt with theirs, slowly, step by step, and in the light of past experience, always bearing in mind that we are framing a Constitution, not drafting a legislative enactment or performing the functions of a board of aldermen. The real progressive method is not to incorporate in the Constitution needless prohibitions of practices found undesirable, and certainly not minute regulations concerning the details of State or municipal governments. The framework of the State government should be so broadly stated that ample room remains within which to adapt ourselves to needs as they arise. It seems to me that as the power of the Legislature to deal with State matters should be complete, so the several municipalities, within broad lines, should be left to mold and operate their local governments in accord with local conditions, subject, of course, to

the sovereignty of the State. The same principle applies to the judicial system, and powers should reside in the courts to adapt their procedure to the needs of the day.

Much of the criticism of judicial delay and judge-made law is neither pertinent nor wholesome in its effect on the public mind. Judges interpret law. The representatives of the people have not kept the law up to present-day demands oftentimes, and criticism of the courts is largely due to their necessary interpretation of statutes ill framed, illogically drawn, and placed upon the books without previous comprehensive investigation. The attempt to enforce beliefs by law rather than to regulate conduct is an evil to be avoided.

Aside from the fundamental question as to the extension of the suffrage, the storm center of recent Constitutional struggles has been the interpretation of the Constitutional protection of life, liberty, and property as a bar to

legislation, such as the Employers' Liability and Workmen's Compensation enactments. Recent amendments to our present Constitution have rectified the condition complained of, and the Constitution guarantees to the individual should remain as they have been throughout our history-the fundamental tenets of our political faith.

There is a tendency continuously to center in the executive added authority. That authority is now comprehensive and potential. Through appointments, the power of removal, the power of veto, and the creation of public opinion by addressing the Legislature, the Governor has all the authority necessary for the proper work of an executive. Practical initiative must come from the Legislature, reflecting public opinion, crystallized in law for the betterment of human society; always mindful, however, of the Constitutional guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. JOB E. HEDGES.

I

AM willing to admit that it was the property group in the colonies which wrote the Constitution of the United States. I am willing to admit that Hamilton and Marshall together did more to establish property right in the country than any other two men who ever lived in it. I am also ready to defend in the main what they accomplished. In the years immediately following the American Revolution the property influence alone had the National interest and the National vision. No other group Icould write the Constitution of the United States and do it so well as it actually was done. Moreover, the establishment of property right is one of the foundations of any

national liberalism which would be worth while. In the critical period immediately following the Revolution there was no genuine democratic movement. Growing out of the circumstances of the time, there was a large opposing propertyless mass who were chiefly conspicuous for what was frequently referred to in the Constitutional Convention as the turbulence and follies of democracy. Now, as between property and antiproperty, there is only one side to take, and that is the side of property. Any minority control of government, no matter how benevolent, is a makeshift; but it is better than anti-property control. At least this can be said for the early property influence in

the United States: It was National to the core, and it sought by the Constitution to establish order and organization for a whole people. There are some things in the Constitution that had to be changed, and others which may still have to be changed, in the interest of a genuine democracy. But, upon the whole, the Constitution was headed right. Under Jefferson and Jackson the country saw the beginning of a real democratic movement, with both its defects and its virtues. It met squarely the philosophy of the control of government by a well-to-do minority and laid the foundations for the ultimate overthrow of such control. At the same time it enormously strengthened the hands of a dominant few in the United States for a hundred years by fastening the spoils system, and thus the political machine, upon the necks of the American people. It is certain property groups working through political machines intrenched and strengthened by the Jack sonian spoils system which have made the path of democracy so difficult in the generation since the Civil War.

Property ownership in plantations and slaves wrested the leadership once more from the democracy of Jefferson and Jackson. But this time it was a property leadership which had neither the National purpose, the National vision, nor the desire to establish justice for all men in the country. It was willing to destroy the Union in order to establish the property right in slaves. It was the task of the statesmanship of Lincoln and the armies of Grant to re-enthrone the rights and power of all over the rights and power of a part.

When the Civil War closed, it seemed that the way had been cleared for the advance of political liberalism in the United States, that it would be possible to work out a programme of popular freedom and equality and human welfare under circumstances perhaps the most favorable in the history of the world. The Republican party, the party of liberty and of human rights, appeared likely to be the channel of it. The Democratic party was broken and discredited by the war. But the death of Lincoln and the harsh and blundering policies of Reconstruction and the creation of the diverting and unfortunate issue of Negro domination, together with the impoverishment of the South by the long struggle, have been retarding to the present moment the course of progress below Mason and Dixon's line. And over the rich industrial East in the generation following the

Civil War there fell the pall of a deadening materialism. The struggle for wealth, both earned and unearned, well-nigh submerged the old democratic ideas of equality, freedom, and fraternity. Strong men went into business and not into the occupation of government-honest strong men as well as greedy and cunning strong men. Honest strong men sought to dominate government in the interest of the upper economic class, upon the theory that, if you center government upon business prosperity, well-being will seep through and refresh the lower economic classes also. Greedy and cunning strong men stole franchises and wrecked railways and bribed and overawed legislatures and courts and pliant politicians. Many city governments, numerous State governments, and frequently the National Government were used as the tools of materialism. For a long time the American people did not feel the pinch of political or economic oppression. Where so much well-being was to be had everybody had something; and the forms of popular government seemed to be working as of old. For a long time the American people did not realize that the substance had departed and that they were no longer free. At last they began to wake up. And this is what they found. To the victors belong the spoils. The giant interests which furnished the sinews of war and the political machines which made use of the funds were the victors. To them belonged the spoils. Democracy was hoist with its own petard. The spoils system of the Jacksonian democracy and industrial prosperity together had undermined freedom.

The modern march of political liberalism in the United States commenced in the West. The Western farmers in the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century began the revolt against political and economic misrule. They haled the railways into court and before commissions to answer the charges of exorbitant rates and unfair discriminations; they invoked the direct primary to break the control of the railway machine which was exercising sovereign power over politics and government in many of the Western States. The Grangers, the Farmers' Alliance, the Populists, were only names for organized groups of men who, like their forebears at Lexington and Concord Bridge, were out to win justice for themselves and, as they conceived it, freedom from their oppressors. (Continued on page following illustrations)