chairman of the highway commissions of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey as to the practical workings of the respective statutes in those States because a large amount of work has been done in each of these commonwealths and these three have each a different system. That of Massachusetts being the centralized system, Connecticut the town system, and New Jersey may be characterized somewhat more properly as the co-operative system. It is not the intention, within the limits of this report, to discuss the great variety of views which have been presented to your Committee. Two volumes of testimony have been taken and a careful digest of other State and foreign laws has been made and carefully examined by the Committee. A digest has been made of the testimony taken to enable the Committee to form an intelligent impression of what may fairly be said to be the consensus of opinion with reference to the larger matters of policy which had to be determined by the Committee before it could make a recodification of the Highway Law. Your Committee believes that the plan and details of the revised code herewith submitted fairly represent the average judgment of the local officers combined with the experience of adjoining States.

186. The Legislative Reference Bureau

These paragraphs from an interesting article in the Review of Reviews by Professor J. R. Commons describe the establishment of an important institution in Wisconsin to assist legislators in securing information on problems coming before them for solution.

A digest of

evidence

and a com

plete law

submitted.

tion of

On his appointment in 1901 Dr. McCarthy, the legislative The colleclibrarian, did a very sensible thing. He started a clipping-bureau. literature. He collected all of the pamphlets, bulletins, reports of commissions, magazine articles, and the like that he could get free. He accumulated as many duplicates as possible for free distribution. He classified them and arranged them under proper headings, paying special attention to the subjects that he knew would come up at the next legislative session. He searched the libraries of

Assistance offered to legislators.

Work for legislative committees.

the several State departments and brought over whatever he thought would be an aid to the legislature. By the time the session met in 1903 he had, not what would be called a library but an up-to-date, live set of aids to law-makers.

But this was preliminary. As soon as the elections had been held he sent to all the members of the incoming legislature a cir cular, telling them something of what he had on hand, and offering to assist them by furnishing information, copies of laws enacted or bills introduced in other States, etc., on any measure that they proposed to bring before the legislature. Over one hundred requests came-in, and he forwarded by mail his clippings, pamphlets, and bills. When the legislature assembled he moved his collection to a room on the same floor. He circulated among the members, brought them to his library, and showed them what he had. He learned what they wanted and, if he did not have it on hand, he immediately wrote or wired to all parts of the country to get it.

When the committees were appointed and began their work he helped them in the same way. He sent hundreds of copies of their bills to experts, commissions, lawyers, and informed citizens in Wisconsin and other States, asking for criticisms, improvements, and accounts of whatever experience they might have had on the points involved. If a lobbyist made a statement before a committee, he would have replies . . . within a day or two . . . from the parties who knew the facts. The chairman of the Committee on Claims has given several instances where these replies saved the State hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Other committees were aided in a similar way. The committees on railway legislation, primary elections, and civil-service reform at the sessions of 1903 and 1905 had before them. . . the bills introduced in other States, the hearings on those bills, arguments of counsel, the best pamphlets and magazine articles, besides pertinent letters from the best-informed men of the country.

187. The Evils of Over-legislation

In an important address before the American Bar Association, Judge Alton B. Parker discussed the problem of hasty and prolix legislation in the American states.

Few questions have been more discussed during recent years than the increasing tendency of legislative bodies to propose and to enact new laws. Scarcely any agitation of a public or a moral question is so unimportant that it does not produce, in nearly half a hundred state capitols, a series of bills supposed to represent it in all its varied and shifting phases. It has become far more common to look for a new law for the punishment of an old offense or for defining anew the relations of individuals to each other than it is to invoke those powers or remedies by which, over many centuries, while law has been gradually taking fixed form, men have been able to punish crimes against society or to settle their own differences.

The zeal for new laws.

for victims.

And yet every man who has had occasion to study the question, Few new principles even in its narrower bearings, has been forced to conclude that but adopted. a small percentage of proposed new enactments involves a new principle, or even a new policy. It rarely happens that an offense is committed for which no proper punishment has been provided, and it is a long time since any real question has arisen between men to demand legal settlement impossible under existing law. . . . Legislation of this order is promoted in many ways. One of The clamor the most efficient agencies is popular clamor. This may be produced by the demagogue, whose interest it is to make the part appear to be the whole. It may be started by the robbery of a savings bank, or by adulteration on the part of some manufacturer, or dishonesty by the head of a business corporation, or in any one of a hundred different ways. Such an agitation will naturally be encouraged by sensational newspapers, and by the oftentimes scarcely less sensational pulpit. As it goes on it gathers force until it passes into one or the other of the many forms of that hysteria which demands nothing so much as a victim. In

The effect of the failure to enforce old laws.

The effect of executive influence.

The

crusades of special interests.

such a period the recurring session of a legislature comes in its due course, or an ambitious or sympathetic governor calls an extra session. Thus dozens of useless laws are placed upon the statute books, every one of which chokes the channels of justice.

Another fruitful source of legislation is the neglect or failure to enforce existing laws. A lax public sentiment, plus an incompetent executive, renders of no effect a wholesome law until the breaches of it become so numerous and offensive that an aroused and indignant public sentiment demands relief. The result is often a demand for further legislation, because it is erroneously assumed that the wrong suffered by the public could not have happened had the laws been adequate for its protection. And a` crop of new and unnecessary statutes is the outcome- unnecessary because all that is needed is rigid enforcement of existing law.

In many cases the misdirected or ignorant zeal of an executive officer is responsible for many new and useless laws. Such an official generally with the elements in him of the agitator, and often of the demagogue — has been carried into office, after an hysterical canvass, under the promise to prosecute certain kinds of accused persons. Once elected, he takes up his work in the same spirit that had characterized his electoral campaign. He indicts with great facility. He tilts against classes or individuals, only to find that juries do not convict, or that, if they do, courts will not sustain. Then comes a new harvest of laws in order to justify or supplement the zeal of men who may be honest, but who are wanting either in judgment or knowledge. In addition there is nothing which can more surely produce contempt of the law than the spasmodic activity to which some prosecutors are addicted. . . .

Another favorite form of legislation is that for the benefit or at the behoof of a party. The continual tampering with election laws and regulations; the creation of useless offices, political or judicial; crusades against or favors conferred upon corporations or interests; the re-organization of city governments; the legislation of one class of officials out of office, in order to put

another in; the institution of a state constabulary for the purpose of controlling the police of great cities for party or personal purposes; the tilting against opponents, a process common to many legislative bodies - all these are productive of such infinite and far-reaching harm as to emphasize the doctrine that no partisan legislation, either proposed before the bodies themselves or pushed in their committees, or enacted into law, can be fair, just or enduring.

The forms of legislative waste here enumerated, and the causes which promote them, serve to show why it is that an almost complete change has come over the character of our legislative bodies. Their presence gives the speaker almost arbitrary power, makes committees into a new form of tyrants, develops management and intrigue into fine arts, produces bosses as a natural result, and, while keeping the larger men out of legislative halls, puts small ones into their places. Log-rolling becomes a necessity, and mischievous or useless bills pass easily and almost by sufferance. The existence of these elements also promotes conflict between urban and rural interests in the hope that one or the other may escape a fair share of that taxation which always grows as a result of such a dangerous rivalry.

Committees and log

rolling.

on the

It is not alone in the domain of law-making and the legislator The burden that these abuses are potent. They add to the labor of the judi- judiciary. ciary. Upon it is thrown for adjudication, year after year, a body of work absolutely unnecessary, and at great expense to the public and often to private individuals. The constitutionality of much of this new legislation is continually questioned. So true is it that a substantial percentage of the questions brought before Appellate Courts are related to doubts of the validity of the laws under which actions are brought. Indeed, in the State of New York, in a period covering about twenty years, the constitutionality of over five hundred statutes was challenged in the Court of Appeals. The dovetailing of new legislation into existing law, and the cost of construing the possible meaning of a legislature, also enter into a considerable part of the annual output of twenty