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ing committees, after the manner of the House of Commons. The first entry in its minutes is of the appointment of five members to be a committee of elections and privileges. Six others were named a committee for justice and grievances, and it is declared that the rules of the body shall be modeled after those of the House of Commons (December, 1682). At the beginning of the next assembly "the Speaker reads to the House the orderly Method of Parliaments, and the Demeanour of the Members thereof observed in England, which he recommended to them as civil and good; As also the Method observed by the English in Committees." But in fact no system of standing committees appears in Pennsylvania until considerably later (1722), after which we find in every session a committee of public accounts and a committee of grievances, and after 1774 a committee of correspondence.

In North Carolina the imperfection of early record makes positive statement difficult, but it appears that the legislature in the early days of the eighteenth century had committees of the whole upon elections, and upon propositions and grievances; that in 1733 it established select committees for the latter matter and for public claims; and that by the time of the Rev. olution its system included standing committees of privileges and elections, propositions and grievances, public accounts, and public claims. In the legislature of New York, always a small body, though the committee of elections and the (select) committee of grievances occur so early as 1699, one finds few committees and no extensive system until 1737, when there appears a system quite after the English model, with a select committee of privileges and elections, and grand committees for grievances, trade, and courts of justice. The assembly of New Jersey, a still smaller body, was virtually without standing committees till the Revolution. Respecting Delaware, South Carolina, and Georgia the writer can at present make no statements. But enough has been said to show that at the time of the Revolution, and many years before the first session of the First Congress, in 1789, the system of standing committees was the regular and established system for the transaction of legislative business in at least five, and those among the most important of the American legislatures. Of the rest, those which did not already have the system adopted it at a later time under the influence of the example of the Federal legislature until it became the universal plan of organization in American legislative bodies.

XXVI-GENERAL JOSEPH MARTIN AND THE WAR OF THE

REVOLUTION IN THE WEST.

slauregard

By PROF. STEPHEN B. WEEKS,

OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

S. Mis. 104-26

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