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THE WISCONSIN IDEA

open to private and public interests alike. If it is difficult to get information because of the great variety of subjects now coming before our legislators, the only sensible thing to do is to have experts gather this material. If business interests have excellent lawyers to look after their legislation, the people should secure the same kind of men to help their representatives. If the business interests secure statisticians, engineers and scientific men, the public should do likewise. If great judges and lawyers are constantly working upon the problems of interpretation of laws, surely men of equal ability could well be consulted or retained by the people's representatives in the construction of these laws.

Now, what do we expect from the successful operation of a system like this? We hope that all legislation may be made better and be placed upon a more scientific basis. We look upon this as a purely business operation. No one would buy land in Texas without having seen the land. You might buy land in a lake or in the bed of a river if you followed such a plan; you would at least have some one look up your abstract. But we permit our legislators to copy a Texas statute which may be twenty years old, may have been modified twenty-five times, may be entirely unsuited to our conditions and which may be in the end unconstitutional—we let our legislators incorporate such statutes in our statute books without a protest. Common sense tells us