Mr. D. Nicoll - Mr. President, I offer the following resolution and move its adoption, and ask that the First Vice-President put the question. The President - The Secretary will read the resolution. The Secretary - By Mr. D. Nicoll: Resolved, That the thanks of this Convention be tendered to the Honorable Elihu Root for the ability, fairness and courtesy which have distinguished his services as President of this Convention. Vice-President Schurman - Gentlemen, you have heard the resolution, Those in favor of its adoption will please rise. The Clerk will record it is a unanimous vote. Mr. Sheehan adoption. Mr. President, I offer the following resolution and move its The President - The Secretary will read the resolution. The Secretary - By Mr. Sheehan: Resolved, That the thanks of the Convention be tendered to the Honorable Jacob Gould Schurman and the Honorable Morgan J. O'Brien, for their efficient and impartial services as VicePresidents of this Convention. The President - All in favor of the resolution will signify by rising. The gentlemen will be seated. The resolution has been unanimously adopted, except that Mr. Schurman did not rise. (The Honorable Jacob Gould Schurman and the Honorable Morgan J. O'Brien rise.) The President - Gentlemen of the Convention: Our work is done. The long, hard months during which we have been wrestling with questions of government, and character has been struggling with character in the discussions of the proposed amendments to the Constitution, are over. We have produced a revised Constitution which is not a model of style, of form, of brevity, of theoretical perfection. Any one of us with the models which are available, could have produced in the solitude of his own office a more perfect and harmonious scheme of government; but this instrument is fitted by patience, experience, knowledge and effort, to the actual conditions of the life of the people who have been growing for three generations, of people living one-half upon the sea and the other half in the river valleys and among the hills and on the shores of the Great Lakes, of a people of 10,000,000 with varied industries and interests and prepossessions and prejudices and sympathies; and to know the full meaning of all the provisions which this instrument contains one must have studied and know the life of the people of all the great State of New York. When we came to our work on the 6th of April last, we addressed ourselves first to studying the conditions of the government of the State. We found that there were serious evils which had resulted in an enormous increase of expenses from $12,000,000 at the time of the last Convention to $42,000,000 at the time of our meeting; an enormous increase of indebtedness and an apparent impossibility meeting all attempts to curtail expenses or to prevent the further accumulation of debt. Upon further inquiry we found that the executive and administrative organization of the State was loose, confused, ill-regulated; that 150 and more separate agencies were going about the business of government, responsible to no one in particular, each one spending all the money that it could get, and there was no such concentration of responsibility and power as was necessary to bring to accountability the agencies of the State which were plunging our people into extravagance and debt. We found that the Legislature of the State had declined in public esteem and that the majority of members of the Legislature were occupying themselves chiefly in the promotion of private and local bills, of special interests, with which they came to Albany, private and local interests upon which apparently their re-elections to their positions depended, and which made them cowards, and demoralized the whole body. We found that the course of justice was slow and expensive and hindered by technicalities and subtleties which kept honest men out of their rights. We found that the great offices, the hundreds of offices of the State were swarming with men who held sinecures, who were put in their places for the benefit of particular organizations and not for the services that they were to render to the State. We have done our best to devise and adopt measures which will remedy these evils. When one's automobile acts strangely and goes wrong, one does not berate it or pass resolutions about it; one endeavors to put his finger on the fault in the machinery and correct the fault. The capacity of a people for self-government is measured by their ability to create and maintain institutions that will govern. Without the institutions of government there can be no government, for the vote alone accomplishes nothing, but in the creation of an active agent. We were elected by the people of the State to overhaul the machinery of government, to ascertain if we could where in that complicated mechanism lay the fault that caused the evils under which they suffered. We have done the best we could. We have given our best brain, our best strength, our best devotion to the accomplishment of that duty and now we submit our work to the people of the State, and we ask of them only this: As we have been your loyal and devoted servants, doing your behest to the best of our ability, be loyal to us and give at least a presumption in favor of the work that we have done. If you find it wrong, reject it; but do not reject it upon light or unconsidered reasons, for it is the best that your representatives, elected by you, devoting themselves for all this long summer to the work, can do to cure the evils of your government. There are two special things which I wish to say before the close of this Convention. One is - and I would like to say it to every citizen of the State one is that this Convention has risen above the plane of partisan politics. It has refused to make itself or permit itself to be made the agency of party advantage except as faithful service for the State is a benefit to party. It has refused to engage in the play of politics. No caucus and no conference has marred the impartiality of our proceeding. No resolution has bound the judgment or conscience of any member of this Convention. Our conception of our duty was to leave behind strife of party, and upon the higher plane of patriotism and love of country, to join all together, whatever our parties, in doing the best we could for the prosperity of our beloved State. One effect of this course of conduct on our part has been that the debates of this Convention compare most favorably with the debates of any parliamentary body which has sat in deliberation during the lifetime of any man in this room. I have seen and heard the debates of many parliamentary bodies and never have I heard or read debates in which the matter was more relevant, the discussion more earnest and to the point, the attempts at display less conspicuous, the speeches for home consumption more infrequent, and real discussion, that real open, public discussion of a deliberative body, which is the essential process of free self-government on a higher level than in this Convention of the year 1915. And another result of this course of conduct has been that the thirty-three measures adopted by the Convention have been adopted by these astonishing votes: Twelve of the measures were adopted unanimously; twelve were adopted by majorities of more than ten to one; of the remaining nine, two were adopted by majorities of more than seven to one; two by majorities of more than four to one; two by majorities of more than three to one; and three by majorities of more than two to one. That, in an assemblage composed of two different and perennially conflicting parties was the result of common patriotic contributions by the members of both parties towards the perfection of measures in a Convention which was doing its work with a sense of the dignity of the people it represented, and not for party advantage. All the great measures of this Convention were adopted not only by the votes, the affirmative votes of a majority of the Republicans but by the affirmative votes of a majority of the Democrats in the Convention. The executive reorganization plan, commonly called the short ballot, was adopted by the votes of 97 Republicans in the affirmative and 15 in the negative, and of 28 Democrats in the affirmative and 15 in the negative. The budget, that great new departure in the finance of the State, was adopted by the affirmative vote of 101 Republicans to 2 Republicans in the negative and of 36 Democrats in the affirmative to 2 in the negative. The city home rule bill was adopted by 102 Republicans voting in the affirmative and 2 in the negative; by 18 Democrats voting in the affirmative and 15 in the negative. The county home rule bill, which completes the scheme, was adopted by 91 Republicans voting in the affirmative and 9 in the negative; and 37 Democrats voting in the affirmative and 2 in the negative. The judiciary bill, that great measure which prescribes the reform in judicial procedure that in the best judgment of this Convention will give the honest man the chance for his rights, was adopted by the affirmative vote of 103 Republicans to 1 Republican in the negative and 32 Democrats to 2 Democrats in the negative. So that in substance, upon the great measures of this Convention both parties of the State are united, both have given their suffrages in favor of the reforms that we propose. One other thing I wish to say and that is that similar evils to those that we have found in our State government have been found in the governments of many other states. People of those states have had recourse to an abandonment or a partial abandonment of representative government. They have had recourse to the initiative and referendum and the recall, the recall of officers and the recall of decisions. In this Convention we have offered the most irrefutable, concrete argument against those nostrums and patent medicines in government and in favor of the preservation of that representative government which is the chief gift of our race to freedom, by undertaking to reform representative government, instead of abandoning it and to make it worthy of its great function for the preservation of liberty. This Constitution is not a matter of little prejudices or oppositions. It is not a business to be decided accordingly as one opposed to raising this salary or that, or to extending the Workmen's compensation or restricting it, or to making a little change in this office or that. It is to be decided upon great lines for it is a great work. It is a great departure in government. It is the best that the men selected by the people of the Empire State, to do the work for them, can do towards rescuing the representative government of our fathers from the obloquy which has come upon it in recent years. These great measures of the reorganization of the executive, of the new method of State finances, of the relief of the Legislature from those petty preoccupations of local and private bills, which have been destroying its morale, of the establishment of the privileges and blessings of local selfgovernment for the cities and for the counties of the State, of reform in judicial procedure, all these are great measures which should appeal to a great people who are competent to maintain the perpetuity of representative self-government. And upon those great lines I feel assured you may be confident the people's verdict will be cast. Now, gentlemen of the Convention, I bid you farewell with assurance of respect and esteem and affection. We have labored long together in a common cause, and I am sure we shall all carry to our homes the inestimable reward of faithful service in the possession of a host of brothers, children of our common country, devoted to the same cause, and loving each other as brother Americans. So I declare the Constitutional Convention of the State of New York of the year 1915 to be adjourned without day. (Applause.) Whereupon at 8:20 p. m. the Constitutional Convention of the State of New York adjourned sine die. |