on American constitutional law,* that our plan of government makes no provision for a colonial system. But the relations of an extra-territorial possession to the United States can never be those of a colony to a European power. Such a colony has generally been treated as an appanage held for the benefit of the commercial interests of the mother country. Its trade, conducted by others and for others, has brought little benefit to its own inhabitants, to whom the navigation laws imposed upon them by a distant power have often seemed a kind of spoliation under the name of protection.

But any possessions, separated from the continent, which the United States may acquire, can rely on being governed under some system devised for the interest of all concerned, and administered by their own inhabitants, so far as they may show a capacity for self-government.

Nor yet need we fear that the United States would not, if the occasion demanded, rule with a strong hand, when we recal the almost despotic system of administration which, under the administration of Jefferson, was forced upon the unwilling inhabitants of the Louisiana and Orleans territories, and maintained until they had learned the real qualities and conditions of American citizenship.

Up to the present time the cost of such of our territory as has come to us by purchase has been, in all, as follows:

It has been cheaply bought, even if we add to these sums the expenditures in the Seminole war, which followed the Florida purchase, and of the Mexican war, which had so close a connection with those which came next.

The greatest lawsuit in the world is now on trial at Paris, brought to define our rights as owner of the remotest of these acquisitions, a little island in the Pacific, farther than is Hawaii from San Francisco. It is a pleasant sign of the times that this controversy arises mainly from a humane sentiment towards the brute creation, and is to be decided precisely as any question between good neighbors might be, by a friendly arbitrament.

*Judge Cooley in the Forum for June, 1893, Vol. xv, p. 393.

XXV.-THE ORIGIN OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE SYSTEM

IN AMERICAN LEGISLATIVE BODIES.

By PROFESSOR J. FRANKLIN JAMESON,

OF BROWN UNIVERSITY.

THE ORIGIN OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE SYSTEM IN AMER

ICAN LEGISLATIVE BODIES.

BY J. FRANKLIN JAMESON.

Mr. Bryce and Mr. Woodrow Wilson have familiarized us all with the notion that the transaction of business through standing committees is one of the leading peculiarities of American legislative bodies, as compared with the English legislature, and indeed perhaps the most important of such peculiarities. Congressional government is mainly government by standing committees and their rôle in State legislatures is equally important. It is therefore somewhat remarkable that, so far as the writer knows, no thorough historical examination has ever been made into the origin of the system. This is, to be sure, of a piece with our usual neglect of the history of all portions of our constitution except such as have found place and mention in the document called the Constitution of the United States. Our system of standing committees is one of the most important elements in our form of government; yet we have been content to examine its development in the Federal Senate and House of Representatives alone, and to assume that its history begins with the year 1789, and with the United States. That the first Congresses had very few standing committees, and that the transaction of nearly all legislative business through them can hardly be said to have become the regular practice of the House until the time of Speaker Clay is familiar. It is the object of the present paper to show that the institution existed long before this, in England and the American colonies, and to trace its development from the sixteenth century to the time of the American Revolution. No doubt two reasons why this has not been done before are, first, that the system has no place in the procedure of the House of Commons, and has virtually had none for nearly two centuries; and second, that it is not found in the colonial legisla tures of New England, the region in which historical writers upon the colonial period have been most numerous.

The standing-committee system, in its modern form, involves the following particulars: The institution by a legislative body, as a regular practice, of several committees, composed of its own members, and continuing in existence throughout the session, each of which has charge of a specific division of the business of the house in such manner that all matters falling within that division are regularly and usually referred to that committee for preparative consideration previously to their disposal by the house. Leaving out of account the ancient "triers of petitions," we may say that in the procedure of the English Parliament the germ of the system is the committee especially appointed to frame a particular statute from a petition or bill. Of such, an instance is found in the records of the House of Commons as far back as 1340. From the beginning of the printed journals of the House of Commons (1547), we find bills committed to one or two members, and other special committees. When Sir Thomas Smith, who died in 1577, wrote his famous treatise of the "Commonwealth of England," committees for framing laws were already an essential part of the procedure of Parliament. In describing its organization, he says:

The Committies are such as either the Lords in the higher House, or Burgesses in the Lower House, doe choose to frame the Lawes upon such Bils as are agreed upon, and afterward to bee ratified by the same Houses.

It marks a distinct forward step in the development of the institution when, at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's third Parliament, on April 6, 1571, we find a group of election cases or a group of bills, all relating to the same general subject, referred to a single committee. In the committees of this session, thus charged with an entire division of the business of the House, we find the germs of three of the great committees of subsequent times, the committee of privileges and elections, the committee of religion, and the committee of grievances. But apparently they did not continue in the exercise of their functions throughout the session, nor do we find an equally developed arrangement in operation during the first two sessions of the Queen's fourth Parliament. In that of 1584-'85 and the next three the standing committee of privi leges and elections was developed. It was natural that this should be the first of the standing committees to attain full development, partly because of the nature of its business, involving many questions too detailed and complicated for discussion in the whole house, partly because of the increas.