586
THE GREEN BAG
Governor who keeps nearly five hundred bills from becoming laws! And the Speaker of the Assembly which passed all these bills, as he surveyed the winter's work from a Chautauquan platform, said: "It is a terrible death to be governed to death. In my judgment we have laws enough." But the New York legislature does not rank as the leader in hasty legislation, for a much smaller state made over a thousand laws in two months. Think of it, you who have spent all your lives in the study of the law. Could you ascertain the neces sity for, let alone critically examine the phraseology of a thousand laws in two months? An interesting feature of some of the legislation of the year is to be found in the efforts made to prevent the railroad cor porations from contesting the validity of statutes in the courts. Under the Minne sota statute, for instance, if the General Counsel of a railroad corporation should advise, on request for his opinion by his client, that the rates prescribed by the statute were confiscatory and, therefore, in violation of the due process of law pro vision of the Constitution, immediately he would be liable to be taken from his office to some remote county of the state and imprisoned in the county jail for ninety days. The material changes in state legisla tion are so many and the report of them so voluminous, that I have embodied them in the appendix, which follows this address. In this connection, I beg the members of the General Council to be assured of my keen appreciation of the valuable infor mation reported by them. If the report has merit, the credit is largely due to their suggestions. Some of the hasty legislation, disclosed by these various volumes reporting either the entirely new laws of the states or the amendments to old ones, is due, in part at least, to an agitation in favor of the assumption of a larger measure of control
by the Federal Government. The argu ments in favor of action in that direction by the federal authorities have been based to a considerable extent on the assertion that the states have failed in their duty. The specific charge has been made that, through their action, legislation has been secured distinctly in aid of corporate schemes which have developed into corporate evils; that efficient remedial legislation has been defeated; and that administrative officials have permitted acts in defiance of law, until men standing at the head of great corporate interests have dared openly to disregard it. Most of the intelligent men of my state and its immediate neighboring states would, I think, concede this to be in some measure true. But the admission does not make the charge any the more palatable. In stead it tends to arouse the public-spirited citizen from his lethargy and to stimulate him to demand local civic righteousness, while the public servant, on the other hand, seeks to hide from his constituents the consequences of his failure to do his duty by much denunciative speaking, coupled with efforts toward law making and law enforcing in harmony with his loud accusa tions. Now, he who surveys the action of the legislative and executive departments of the state governments during the last few months, cannot with truth say that they have been inactive during this period. Nor can he say that the federal government has been more active or more drastic in its action than have the states. But it can be said, and therefore it should be said, that the federal government began the crusade. Therein was to be found, it seems to me, the sole basis for the assump tion that the federal government, had it possessed the power, would have done better than the states. That assumption, considered in the light of the circumstances preceding and possibly inducing it, presents but a feeble argument in favor of taking
