was no difficulty in obtaining compliance under all these heads. In addition, the new constitutions were made a catalogue of the new ideas of government and control that had survived the Civil War and blossomed amid the economic changes of the eighties.

The great length of the new documents was one of the most visible facts. Increasingly the constitutions were recording the distrust which Americans were coming to feel towards their own governments. Every constitution was clearer upon the things that the legislatures could not do than upon the ends to be attained by legislation. There were long clauses to prevent the granting of favors to corporations, banks, or railroads; there were sections reflecting the experiences of the granger movement, and asserting the public right over common carriers. There was the usual manhood suffrage, and in one of the new constitutions of 1889, that of Wyoming, there was woman suffrage as well. The constitutions approximated codes rather than organic laws, and there was a costly paradox in that they showed an intent to develop programs of State action, yet drew iron-clad restrictions to make such programs ineffective.

Early in November, 1889, President Harrison issued a series of proclamations admitting the four States of the Omnibus Bill; their Senators and Congressmen, all Republican, took their seats when the Fifty-first Congress met the following month. The exigencies of the party contributed to the success which was accorded by this Congress to two of the territories that had been left outside the Omnibus Bill, yet desired statehood. It was in this session that Thomas B. Reed, of Maine, earned the title of "Czar" by his courageous career as Speaker of the House; and it was only by a stern party administration that a majority was held together to support his rules. In the Senate there was a fairly easy situation, but every member was needed every day in the House. The five new Republicans of the Omnibus States were useful to their party. Two more from Wyoming and Idaho were added in the summer of 1890. On the merits of the case, both States might easily have been excluded, but the party needed votes, and Congress was fatigued by the long wrangle over admission of territories, that had been heard for more than ten years. New Mexico, with Democratic tendencies, was indeed rejected; Arizona was impossible; Utah had seen the light, but had not yet been permitted to make a constitution.

F. L. Paxson, "The Admission of the Omnibus States," in State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Proceedings, 1911.

CHAPTER LIX

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE FRONTIER

WITH the admission of the Omnibus States, and the two others that trailed into the Union after them, the work begun by the old Congress of the Confederacy was substantially completed. The thirteen original States were supplemented by thirty-one that had been admitted to the Union. The forty-four that now constituted the United States embraced in their territory not only all that the founders had ever dreamed of, but much that had been willingly conceded to the desert. The huge territorial area of 1876 was forever broken up. Never in so short a time had so large an area been at one stroke lifted to statehood, nor so many States been added, as these six that entered the Union in less than nine months. The process that is fundamental in the American empire, and that marks it as different from any of its predecessors, was nearly worked out.

The American process, outlined in the legislation of the Continental Congress in the Ordinances of 1784 and 1787, contemplated a motherland and dependent colonies, like any other empire; but differed from others in the promise that dependency was a temporary status, to be terminated by the transition from social adolescence to adult stature, and to be marked then by full admission to all the privileges of the nation. The spirit of freedom and progress, encouraged by frontier conditions, gave rise to this new theory of imperialism. The United States never seriously wavered in its adherence to it. The Ordinance of 1787, in all its fundamentals, was as effective in the admission of Wyoming or Idaho as in that of Vermont or Ohio. It was never necessary to revise its principles. Congress had modified details as the years rolled on, but had left the substance intact.

Perhaps one of the reasons why the pledge of 1787 continued to bind was the fact that the American Federal Government did not develop a governing caste, or a colonial office. The plague of the spoils system was the horde of inefficient placemen who abused the territories; its salvation was their inefficiency and impermanence. If American conditions had bred at Washington a colonial office like that of England, the normal tendency of an effective bureau

cracy might well have been to block the development of States and to induce a reinforced conviction that territories were not yet ready for admission. But there is no evidence that a policy was ever developed for the government of the territories. Their officers were given their commissions, generally to reward political services. They were then turned loose, subject only to the restrictions that the courts and the appropriation bills might place upon their conduct. The President was too busy to interest himself in their affairs. The State Department had no agencies of control. The Indian Bureau, the Land Office, and the War Department all exercised some concurrent jurisdiction with the territorial officers, and there was some interlocking of functions, but no American ever made a reputation founded upon his knowledge of territorial affairs, and his success in administering them. When the Spanish War resulted in transferring detached colonies to the control of the United States there was no going establishment ready to receive them, despite the fact that in a century the country had raised forty-two governments from dependent status to full participation. It became necessary to attach the island colonies to a bureau in the War Department, unhappily so efficient as to preclude any early granting of full autonomy.

In the course of admitting the new States Congress devised mechanisms for giving effect to the policy of the legislation of 1787. Statehood was never forced upon any community although it was sometimes, as in the case of Nevada, offered in so tempting a fashion as to accelerate the movement. Colorado declined the offer of 1864, as did Nebraska, and upon several occasions territories refused to accept the first terms offered them by Congress. Iowa rejected admission upon the first terms because of the boundary involved. Arizona and New Mexico declined joint admission in 1906.

The pressure was more commonly the other way, with territories demanding admission earlier than Congress was ready to accord it. The first three new States, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee were hardly to be regarded as creations of the United States, for all had been formed prior to the Constitution. They were unfinished business of the Revolution. But Ohio, the first State to be guided through all the preliminaries by Congress, was the occasion for the passage of the earliest of the enabling acts, whereby Congress kept its control over the details of the statehood process. The enabling acts gave formal authority to pro

ceed, fixed the qualifications of voters and shaped the conventions, and dictated the further terms to be complied with before admission. Of the thirty-one States added to the Union since Ohio, more than half, eighteen, have operated under enabling acts; and of the thirteen not enabled, two already possessed statehood before their independent admission and one was a free republic. These were Maine (a part of Massachusetts), West Virginia (a part of Virginia), and Texas. The virtue of the enabling policy, from the standpoint of Congress, was the vantage it gave for determining in advance of admission the full compliance of the State with policies of the Government of the United States. The political theorists of some of the States have engaged at times in the profitless discussion as to whether it is the act of Congress that creates the State, or the act of the people in framing and ratifying the constitution. The impossibility of an American State existing outside the Constitution and continuing to be American, makes the date set by Congress for admission the one of practical significance, however much the people may believe that they have become a State at any earlier time.

The growth and spread of democracy have been revealed not only in the content of the State constitutions, but in the method in which they have come into effect. The first revolutionary constitutions were often framed by the legislatures which had seized full authority, and which declared the basic laws to be operative without further sanction. By the date of the Philadelphia Convention, in 1787, it had come to be believed that a legislative body chosen under an old basic law was incompetent to form a new constitution, and that a special convention chosen by the people for this purpose was indispensable. But it was accepted in theory that when such a convention met it embodied the full sovereignty of the people, could perform legislative as well as constituent functions, and could not only construct a new constitution, but promulgate it and give it force. The earlicr new States were admitted under constitutions thus promulgated, and the radical democrats of the age of Jefferson saw nothing inconsistent with their democracy in this assumption of power by a constitutional convention. The Mississippi convention of 1817, for reasons which have not been clearly established, broke from this practice, and submitted its constitution to a referendum by the people, which referendum gave it validity. The new method was in close accord with the democratic ideas of the Jacksonian period, and soon be

came general. Five subsequent States adhered to the old process, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida, but all the rest preferred to submit the constitution to popular ratification. Illinois was the only northern State after Mississippi to promulgate an original constitution. The same procedure was extended to the ratification of amendments and to most of the new constitutions that the States made as they outgrew their original constitutional garments.

The earlier habit of Congress was to await the action of the territory under the enabling act and to pass a law admitting the State after the presentation of a constitution. Missouri was an exception to this, for the ultimate admission of that State depended upon an examination of the degree of its compliance with terms that Congress set. The President admitted it by proclamation. There was a similar provision in the case of Nevada, and thereafter admission by proclamation became a general rule, broken only by Wyoming and Idaho whose completed constitutions Congress accepted without further action. In the case of Arizona this method of admission was complicated because the President of the United States objected to a provision of its constitution, and declined to exercise his power to admit the State. The natural result of the frequent repetition of the steps in making and admitting new States was to keep alive a familiarity with constitutional matters, and to engender among the people the habit of self-government.

After 1890 there were four additional States to be anticipated, and only four. None of these was to be the orderly result of frontier advance, and each was to be admitted in its own time and in its own way. Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona were territories, unripe or unfit for immediate action; Oklahoma was a new creation of the year in which the Omnibus States were formed.

Oklahoma was given the usual territorial form of organization in 1890 after a dozen years of active contest over the future of the Indian Country. Thrust in between Texas and Arkansas, this was the southern tip of the tract which, by Monroe's Indian policy had been forever devoted to Indian occupancy. The Indian Intercourse Act of 1834 provided for the exclusion of white residents, and safeguarded the native inhabitants. The Five Civilized Tribes were already colonizing the eastern end of the tract beyond Arkansas when the policy was undertaken. In succeeding years, as the course of events undid the work of Monroe's policy, the Indian