Proceedings & Collections - NSHS - Vol. IV

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I.-HISTORICAL PAPERS.

AMERICAN STATE LEGISLATURES.

BY ALBERT WATKINS.

[Read before a meeting of the Society, January 15, 1890.]

   The convention which lately formed the constitution of North Dakota was nearly equally divided on the question of departing from the rule of all states of the union in providing, for a single instead of a dual legislative body. This action suggests an inquiry into the reasons for thus dividing legislatures, especially where there is no appreciable difference in the composition of the two houses, as in the case of the, Nebraska legislature. I give notice at the outset that the object or expectation of the inquiry is rather to show that the dual system is more a clumsy mechanical device of the people to hinder business which their creatures, the legislatures, are created to do, than an undertaking to prove that this arbitrary, clumsy device could be now advantageously or safely abolished.
   I am not, however, so much appalled at the unanimous facts of forty-two dual legislatures in esse which confront me, as the average prudence would have me be, when I consider how far and how largely we are ruled by habit and prejudice and what average legislatures ought to be rather than what they are. I think a strong case may be made against the legislative house, divided against itself that the purpose of its being a house at all may fall, in view of the considerations as to what legislatures ought to be and might be made to do by intelligent selection of their members and proper constitutional and parliamentary restraint.
   The composition of the two houses of the Nebraska legislature is the same in every particular except the unimportant ones that the upper house is furnished with in ex-officio presiding officer, and that the districts from which the senators and representatives are sent are not strictly identical. But in general senators and representatives may be classified in groups by counties. Moreover members of both houses are elected at the same time for the same term, receive the

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same pay and are made unlike only by dividing them into unequal bodies and christening them with different names, before requiring them to perform precisely the same legislative duties in form and in fact.
   None of the reasons which led to the invention of the dual system applies to the separation of the Nebraska legislature. Continued adherence to the dual system in the absence of the inherent difference in the composition of the two houses, which originally caused and justified separate organization and action, must be explained as a merely arbitrary clog to the operation of representative bodies. The plan seems to be an illogical, though possibly to some extent an effective attempt to prevent legislatures from doing those things which they ought not to do, by throwing obstructions in the way of their doing those things they ought to do. and which they are created to do. Twelve states, namely, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee and Vermont are like Nebraska in having the term of the members of the two houses equal. In all other states the terms of members of the upper house are double those of the lower, except New Jersey, which elects senators for three years and representatives for one year; in Connecticut and New York the terms are respectively two years and one year; of the main reasons given by constitutional writers for separating legislatures into two houses, namely, that by giving members of the upper house a term double that of the lower house, the former will bring greater experience to their duties and at least half of the members of one house in any legislature will have had the experience of one session. The thirteen states named fall short of supplying this reason for division. But the same results could be secured if desirable by re-electing such members of the single house as show themselves trustworthy and efficient in their first session. But as the dual legislature can only be defended as the result of distrust by the people of their chosen representatives, so the same distrust of their own political work would make them question their, ability to re-elect deserving members so as to profit by their experience.
   Our federal and state legislatures were modeled in respect to the

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two houses after the British constitution. The house of lords was a result or development of the great struggle of the feudal barons between themselves and, also more or less in common against the crown, which resulted in the establishment and recognition of the monarchy on the one hand, and certain powers, among them legislative functions, on the part of the nobility, ecclesiastic and lay, which came to constitute the peers or upper house of parliament. Their original function was to formally consent to the levying of taxes on their domains by the king. The commons were summoned to parliament first in the thirteenth century when the increasing wealth of the cities and boroughs excited the covetousness of the crown and the increasing spirit of independence which received a great impetus from the great charter, rendered it discreet to obtain formal consent to taxation on their property from the commons as well as from the insubordinate nobility. At the first the functions of the commons were to consent to taxation and to petition for redress of grievances. The crown formulated and executed the laws. The parliament simply suggested such measures as they thought desirable, In our day the process is reversed; the executive formally suggesting to the legislatures such laws as he thinks should pass; and his suggestions to his parliaments are probably oftener barren than were the like suggestions of the parliaments to the executive in those early times.
   While the commons and the lords for a century sat in the same hall, Westminster, they always voted separately, and finally, in the reign of Edward III, they occupied separate halls. Previous to the French revolution we find the legislative body of France, which was the best example of the development of the feudal system, divided into two. houses, the nobility, spiritual and lay, and the commons.
   Hamilton, who was essentially a monarchist of the English type, in spirit, used the self-same arguments for the provision for a Senate in the federal constitution which had been for several centuries used in defense of the English house of lords.
   To Hamilton the chief task in constructing the new constitution, ostensibly for a popular government, was to protect the government against the people. His idea in this regard was the idea somewhat modified which had sustained or justified despotic government of the world, with here and there an exception, throughout history. In the Federalist he sets forth at length the supposed necessity of a check

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on the functions of a representative legislative body. Thus; "There are particular moments in public affairs when the people stimulated by some irregular passion or some illicit advantage or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will be most likely to condemn. In these critical moments how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth all regain their authority over the public mind. What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often avoided if their governments had so provided a safeguard [as an aditional (sic) body in the legislative department] against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next. It adds no small weight to these considerations to recollect that history informs us of no long-lived republic which had not a senate. Sparta, Rome and Carthage are in fact the only states to which that character can be applied. In each of the two first there was a senate for life. The constitution of the senate in the last is less known. It is at least certain that it had some quality or other which rendered it all anchor against the popular fluctuations and that a smaller council drawn out of the senate was appointed not only for life but filled up vacancies itself. Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power; there are numerous instances of the former as well as the latter, and the former rather than the latter is most to be apprehended by the United States.
   "In republican governments the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches and to render them by different modes of election and different principles of action as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit.
   "Another defect to be supplied by the senate lies in the want of due acquaintance with the objects and principles of legislation. It is not possible, that an assembly of men called for the most part from pursuits of a private nature, continued in appointment for a short time, should, if left wholly to themselves, escape a variety of errors.

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   "The instability of the public councils arising from the rapid succession of new members,. however qualified they may be, points out in the strongest manner the necessity of some stable institution in the government. To trace the mischievous effects of all unstable government would fill a volume."
   But the senates of Nebraska and of the twelve other states named being of equal terms and chosen at the same elections and by the same modes from virtually identical constituencies fulfill none of the purposes of a second or upper house cited by Hamilton.
   As for the contention that no republic without a senate or second house has been long-lived - that is scarcely applicable to modern conditions. The fact that our states differ from all those cited in illustration of this point, in having written and firmly established fundamental laws or constitutions as a barrier against hasty and radical legislation all but destroys the force of the argument, and the radically different conditions of our society as compared with any other which has ever attempted republican government completes the destruction.
   Moreover the distinction between the republics, so called, of Athens and Sparta, in respect to their duration is of no practical importance. If Sparta, beginning with the Lycurgan establishment of government may be said to have lived 500 years, Athens from the time of Solon lived about 400 years. Neither had a regular or steady republican government; the modern well defined system of representative bodies existed in neither. One of the legislative bodies of Athens consisted of a popular assembly which would be fatal to order or stability in our day even in our country; and on the other hand the Spartan government was not republican at all, for the popular assembly, composed of all citizens thirty years old and upwards, had only a veto power. It could reject the measures of the senate but could initiate none. Moreover during a portion of Sparta's existence the Ephors, five in number, governed the republic with despotic power. If, after having reached under a more popular government than that of Sparta, a development in art, literature and philosophy unrivalled (sic) in previous history, and which inform the art, literature and philosophy of our own times, Athens was at last overcome by the superior brute force of Sparta, it was only to be followed to political oblivion by her destroyer a short hundred years later.

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   Republican Rome, like the later imperial Rome, was always on the border, or in the midst of disorder and revolution. At times the consuls proposed all laws which the senate might enact, and practically governed with despotic power. Again, the tribunes of the people or plebians were virtually the law makers and more or less absolute rulers of the republic. But the senators, irresponsible to the people, illustrated the conclusion to which enlightened reason would lead us by becoming distinguished more than for anything else as the frequent tools of ambitious military usurpers of the government or other conspirators against such semblance of popular liberty as Rome enjoyed. There is much more reason to believe that a single representative legislature, chosen by the people, unhampered and uncorrupted by the senate for life, depository of vice and defiance of popular rights, would have given Rome a free arid stable government longer than she enjoyed the uncertain and capricious pretense of republican liberty by the help of an unrepublican Senate, or even appreciably longer than the people of Athens maintained a real republic.
   President John Adams passionately cites the career of the Italian republics of the middle ages as examples of the fatal effects of single legislatures, and Chancellor Kent singularly enough quotes this irrelevant nonsense with approval to sustain his own views in the commentaries. I need scarcely refer to the general incapacity of the Latin race for self-government and to the particular sterility of the middle age Italian soil for real republicanism in support of this stricture. By parity of reasoning we might convince John Adams and Chancellor Kent that whereas the Christian religion of the Italian republics and of their time, ere it all become permeated, enlightened and humanized by the revival and spread of the old Greek culture, is known to us and to history chiefly as a machine for human butchery, therefore the Christianity of our day is bad and ought to be abolished.
   Justice Story advocates the division of legislative bodies because it secures a deliberate review of the same measures by independent minds in different branches of the government and organized upon a different system of elections; because it affords great security to public liberty by requiring the cooperation of different bodies which can scarcely ever embrace the same sectional or local interests in the

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same proportion as a single body. The value of such a separate organization will of course be greatly enhanced the more the elements of which each body is composed differ from each other in the mode of choice in the qualifications and in the duration of office of the members."
   "There should be dissimilarity in the genius of the two bodies to prevent sudden passion."
   "The senate must be less numerous than the house and have a proper, that is, longer term of office. Better acquaintance with legislation through longer terms would prevent mutability in public councils and would keep alive a sense of national character." This sense of national character perhaps was not foreseen by Mr. Story to be a sense that everybody is a millionaire, or at least that all senators are millionaires; that nobody who is not a millionaire can be a senator, arid that if anybody is only a millionaire and nothing more, he is eligible to the senate and very likely to get there if he wants to. To this complexion of a plutocracy of commonplaces, has this senate come at last; conceived as it was by an avowed aristocratic monarchist and hater of popular government (Hamilton) and so chosen in that undemocratic way by the legislatures as would insure its degradation and growing condemnation by the people. Story repeats Hamilton's irrelevant imaginings about Rome, Sparta and Carthage and in substance much more of his obsolete undemocratic conjuring.
   Chancellor Kent's arguments for the dual houses are in substance a copy of Hamilton's and Story's, based on the assumption that popular government is dangerous and ought to be hampered and emasculated as much as possible.
   If we examine into the organization of the legislative bodies of European states we find almost universally illustrated and proposition that the second or upper house is established not for the influence the mere duplication or division of the legislature has on legislation, but to keep the titled, aristocratic arid hereditary sheep separate from the ephemeral plebeian goats. Where the upper house is not composed of nobles or other aristocrats with hereditary privileges, among which is their right to seats in the legislature, then the members are distinguished from those of the lower house by the greater length of their terms, difference in mode of election, or other devices for secur-

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ing greater experience and less direct relation to the popular sentiment. The senate of the French republic, for example, is composed of 225 members, chosen for nine years by the departments, and seventy-five life members.
   The general legislature of Austro-Hungary consists of 120 delegates, sixty chosen annually by the Hungarian diet, and sixty by the Austrian reichsrath - forty by the lower and twenty by the upper house respectively.
   The Austrian legislature consists of a house of lords composed of hereditary nobles and prelates and an unlimited number of life members appointed by the emperor; and a house of deputies of members chosen by the provincial diets for six years. Even the provincial diets are composed of two classes - archbishops and bishops, and delegates elected annually.
   The Hungarian diet comprises an upper house called the "table of magistrates," which has the formidable composition of three archdukes, thirty-one archbishops and church dignitaries, twelve imperial banner-bearers, fifty-seven presidents of counties, 219 counts, eighty barons and three regalists. The table of deputies or lower house is composed of 444 members, elected for three years, and which meets annually. Verity this legislature is after Hamilton's own heart, so broken into different branches as to render them by different modes of election and different principles of action as little connected with each other," etc.
   The Prussian landtag or house of lords is composed of noble heads of chapters, heads of universities, burgomasters of towns of 50,000 people, and unlimited members appointed by the king for life or a definite time. The house of deputies has 432 members elected for three years. The provincial assemblies merely apportion taxes; they cannot originate measures.
   Bavaria's upper house or reichsrath comprises nobles, prelates and other members appointed at pleasure by the crown. The lower house is composed of deputies selected by electors chosen by the people.
   The "Storthing" of Norway is composed of members elected by deputies: one for every fifty inhabitants of towns, and one for every 100 inhabitants in rural districts. These deputies choose the members of the storthing from themselves or other qualified voters. This

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legislature is then arbitrarily divided into two houses in the ratio of three to one and they have annual sessions.
   In Sweden the upper house is chosen by electors for nine years. The members must own real estate to the amount of 80,000 riks dollars. They receive no salary. The members of the lower house must own property amounting to 1,000 riks dollars. They receive salaries (1,200 riks dollars.) The legislature has annual sessions which may last four months.
   Some of the cantons of Switzerland are governed by popular assemblies; others by a grand council, which in turn choses (sic) a "little council" for an executive. In many of these cantons legislation may be referred to the people, who exercise a veto power.
   The senate of the Dominica of Canada is appointed by the governor-general on the recommendation of the privy council. The upper house. of the local legislature of the province of Quebec is composed of twenty-four life members appointed by the executive. Ontario (province) has a single legislative body of eighty-eight, members, elected by the people and to whom the executive council is responsible. Nova Scotia has an upper legislative house of twenty-one members, appointed by the executive for life. In New Brunswick a like life council of fifteen members constitutes the upper house.
   Thus the local or provincial legislative bodies of the principal countries of Europe and North America have upper houses or senates radically different in composition and organization from their respective lower houses. Where the legislature is composed of two houses, this rule is without exception, save in the case of Norway and the states of our union.
   Since the foregoing was written I find that Bryce, in the American Commonwealth, explains the origin and existence of the dual system in our state legislatures as I have done, thus: "An American state Legislature always consists of two houses. The origin of this very interesting feature is to be sought rather in history than in theory. It is due partly to the fact that in some colonies there had existed a small governor's council in addition to the small representative body, partly to a natural disposition to imitate the mother country with its lords and commons. Now, however, the need of two chambers has become an axiom of political science, being based on the belief that

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the innate tendency of all assembly to become hasty, tyrannical and corrupt needs to be checked by the co-existence of another house of equal authority." This reason is equivalent to that given to the writer hereof by one of the committee of five who made the first constitution of Nebraska. He said that there were some suggestions made in this committee in favor of a single legislative body, but they were not considered as of much weight or importance, for the reason that in his Carlylean opinion members of the legislature did not materially differ from the rest of mankind in being mostly fools, and that the natural, or rather humanly natural, jealousy and opposition between the two divisions of fools was necessary to hinder as much as possible the naturally mischievous antics of fools. This seems to be the somewhat exaggerated gist of the defense of the division of state legislatures on the Nebraska plan. It also drives the thoughtful citizen to search for a remedy for this most unfortunate state of affairs. In pointing the way to this conclusion I have fulfilled the chief object of this paper. To point out the means of reform whose real necessity is suggested by the conclusion, by our knowledge of the distrust and even contempt with which state legislatures are popularly regarded, is the greater task. It is easy to concede that virtue brings happiness, but no man has been able to put in practical operation a device to make ordinary men embrace this virtue, much less members of our state legislatures. The constitution of Vermont rises theoretically to the demands of the situation in this provision: "The house of representatives of the freemen of this state shall consist of persons most noted for wisdom and virtue." I am inclined to the opinion that there was real virtue in this demand, which, its juxtaposition with the facts here stated would be taken as a jest in the Nebraska constitution, for Vermont held to the single legislative body for fifty years, or until 1836. I dissent from the Carlylean estimate of humanity to the extent of holding that if this provision of the Vermont constitution were acted upon by the people of the several states in choosing members of the legislature the dual system and the principal evils of legislatures, of which the dual system is a sign, would be abolished together.
   It is a noticeable fact that the most important recent discussions of our state legislatures and legislation appear in English publications that of Mr. Bryce in the American Commonwealth, and that of Dr. Shaw

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in the Contemporary Review, the data of the one evidently gathered largely from the other. Most of the facts I have here cited relative to the organization of legislatures I had collected by all examination of the constitutions of the several States before finding that many of them were set forth in the Commonwealth.
   I am rot prepared to admit that the fact that our states all adhere to the double house system is a conclusive argument that it is a necessary or a better system than the single house would prove if it were fairly tried. It has not been fairly tried. The experience of Pennsylvania and Georgia for a brief period many years ago followed by a change to the dual system does not prove the impracticability of the single plan any more than the adherence of Vermont to the single plan for fifty years in the same early times proves its superiority. The rash and sudden passage of measures by a single legislature could be guarded against by requiring their consideration at any three different times with wide intervals. The prompt passage by the Nebraska house of representatives in 1885 of an appropriation to reward the slayers of Griffin in the notorious treasury robbery fiasco, may be pointed to as an example of the dangers of a single house, yet it might be replied that proper restriction would have prevented the final passage of the appropriation until the better and cooler public opinion had become effective to. bar it altogether. On the other hand the stupid, arbitrary and very hurtful hindrance of public business and defeat of important and needful measures by a combination of only 18 members of the Nebraska senate of 1889 could not have been perpetrated if the little easily packed senate had been merged with the house, making a single body too large and diverse for successful combination or manipulation, and where all members would have the benefit of the discussion of all measures. While it is certain that the merging of the two houses of the Nebraska legislature would save upwards of $30,000 in expenses biennially, it is by no means certain that it would not biennially save the defeat of many good measures or secure the more thorough investigation and understanding of all measures. While occasionally a rash measure might pass the single house, which would be arrested in the time-consuming routine machinery of the second house, yet I am not rash enough to believe that in general the people's best judgment and real interests might not be better and oftener represented

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in the statutes and less often defeated by sinister combinations and influences under the single that under the dual system. Hamilton was chiefly solicitous to conserve the interests of the aristocratic class from the vulgar hands of the mistrusted people by the conservative non-popular senate. Does not much of the fear for the rashness of the single legislature rest upon a like solicitude for the peculiar interests of corporative combinations which confront the popular interests and will in every legislature?
   The people of France when they rose to the mighty task of overthrowing, so as never to rise again, the intolerably brutal and despotic feudalism of 1,000 years' growth - the most daring if not the most momentous stroke for liberty in modern times - intuitively insisted on a single legislative assembly for the work. A divided chamber could not have done that heoric (sic) work. The doomed king shrewdly sent his messenger to order the vulgar commons to disperse and return to their separate chamber. "Gentlemen," said be, "you have heard the orders of the king." "Yes," said the president, and I am now about to take the orders of the assembly." The orders of that single assembly annihilated the titled brutes that for ten centuries had ridden through their lives of riotous luxury on men as their beasts of burden.
   The first and at the first the all-important provisions found in our state constitutions are heroic declarations against all manner of possible trespass on popular rights by the executive. Now these bullwarks (sic) against one man power are followed and superseded by others against the encroachments of the people through their representatives. These are interesting evidences of the growth and change of institutions and public opinion. Dr. Shaw points with approval to the minute directions and prohibitions for the guidance and restriction of legislatures which are increasing in our constitutions. The constitution of California with 27,000 words is phenomenal in this regard, but that of the just formed state of Washington with 20,000 is much longer than the constitutions of the older states, though most of these have been much lengthened by the addition of minute provisions, many of them in the nature of legislative enactments.
   Bryce's remedy, consisting of choosing members without reference to localities, so as to have districts free to send peculiarly fit men to the legislature, is so repugnant to our well settled notions of local

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government, involving the strictest plan of local representation, as to be impracticable.
   The veto power of the executive originally exercised in only one state, Massachusetts, but now in all but four, is apparently a salutary corrective of legislative error.
   The general provisions in state constitutions against special legislation and restricting indebtedness are proper and valuable. The state of Iowa was one of the earliest and most radical in this regard, the limit of indebtedness being $100,000. The Washington constitution fixes the limit at $400,000 - unless extended by a vote of the people. This state also prohibits the voting of subsidies for railways or any other similar purposes whatever; prohibits the issuing of railway passes to, or their use by, public officers, and provides that corporate property shall be taxed by the same mode and plan as private property; provides that no county officer shall be eligible to office for more than two terms in succession, and that the legislature shall pass maximum freight and passenger rates for railway companies.
   The constitution of North Dakota is surcharged with provisions in the nature of mere statutory enactments which swell the instrument to the enormous proportions of 28,500 words. It locates in detail the state public institutions, thirteen in number; in a lengthy section prohibits the governor from using his official influence or promise to affect legislation, and from menacing members with threats of the veto power, prescribing severe penalties. It contains an enactment against trusts and combinations; prohibits child labor; provides that the public schools shall instruct in those branches of knowledge which tend to impress upon the mind the vital importance of truthfulness, temperance, purity, public spirit, and respect for honest labor of every kind." The modern Shakespeare would find sermons enough in constitutions without looking for them in stones. We find in this prolific instrument also the exchange of "black lists" between corporations prohibited; state indebtedness limited to $200,000; strict limitations of county and municipal indebtedness, and prohibition of the giving of donations or bonuses to corporations or individuals by counties or municipalities. While Doctor Shaw approves of these voluminous constitutional enactments because they restrict so much the power and scope of the legislature, yet judged by Judge Cooley's conception of the true character of a constitution,
   3

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fully one-half of the stuffing of the North Dakota constitution would have to be eliminated. That eminent jurist says: "But since, while constitutional provisions are in force, they are to remain absolute and unchangeable rules of action and decision, it is obvious that they should not be made to embrace within their iron grasp those subjects in regard to which the policy or interest of the state or of its people may vary from time to time, and which are, therefore, more properly left to the control of the legislature, which can more easily and speedily make the required change. A constitution is not the cause but consequence of personal and political freedom; it grants no rights to the people, but is the creature of their power; the instrument of their convenience. It is but the framework of the political government and necessarily based upon the pre-existing condition of laws, rights, and habits of thought. These instruments measure the power of the rulers, but they do not measure the rights of the governed. It is easier to tell what a constitution is not than what it is." This last remark was made before the constitutions of California and North Dakota.
   But the jurist to the contrary notwithstanding, the decided tendency of the people to legislate directly for themselves as shown in these constitutions, illustrates, just as does the division of homogeneous legislatures, the distrust of the people in their representative bodies.
   The common bribery of legislatures by various combinations and corporations to violate the popular will probably justifies the growing tendency of the people to give minute orders in state constitutions relative to the control of such combinations. I am inclined to think that these minute provisions of constitutions have come to stay, as a logical development and not as a fad, even as Justice Cooley himself is now the official defender of the principle of minute control of corporations, the advocacy of which a short ten years ago won the stigma of a demagogue, which was the crushing and only answer. Two things done will lead to great improvement of the character and work of state legislatures, viz: the settlement as definitely as possible of the question of legislative control of corporations, and the overthrow of the spoils system in parties. The first will destroy or weaken the motive of the venal and characterless men for getting

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into the legislatures and their means of getting there. The latter, by weakening party ties, will open the way for better men into legislatures, will inspire them with the willingness, if not the ambition to get there, and will give freer play to those members who are of good inclinations, and so a vastly increased advantage over the bad. Mr. Bryce says: "The best men in both parties support the civil service commission, the worst men would gladly get rid of it." I would modify this somewhat by saying: "The most thoughtful men are coming to support it, the most thoughtless oppose it."
   There is a crying need for the scholar in politics and other independent and thinking men to leaven the sordid legislative lump. Doubling the term of Nebraska's senators would at least give some logical reason for their existence. Longer sessions of the state legislatures instead of the short limit, which is the tendency of the later constitutions, would doubtless be beneficial in securing more deliberate and careful work. One of the authors named herein maintains that there is a tendency toward longer sessions and cites in proof the cases of Nebraska and Colorado, where these sessions have been lengthened respectively from forty to sixty days and from forty to ninety days. But this does not hold good when it is considered that twenty-six of the states now limit the sessions; and in the constitutions of all four of the states just admitted the limit is not only made but confined to sixty days.
   The Wisconsin plan of unlimited sessions and a salary of $500 for members would seem to be more rational than the prevailing tendency toward limited short sessions.
   Another illustration of the distrust of and the tendency to muzzle legislatures is the fact that up to 1830 in no states were judges elected by the popular vote. Now only the legislatures of Rhode Island, New Jersey, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia elect judges, and these of the supreme and appellate courts.
   When these restrictions are made as complete and comprehensive as they reasonably can be made; when the quality of membership of the legislature is so greatly improved as a reasonably intelligent and honest selection would improve it; and when the initiative to legislation shall be placed more in the hands of expert boards, such as boards of charities and reform, bureaus of statistics and industries,