on the functions of a representative legislative body. Thus: "There are particular moments in public affairs when the people stimulated by some irregular passion or some illicit advantage or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will be most likely to condemn. In these critical moments how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth can regain their authority. over the public mind. What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often avoided if their governments had so provided a safeguard (as an aditional body in the legislative department) against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next. It adds no small weight to these considerations to recollect that history informs us of no long-lived republic which had not a senate. Sparta, Rome and Carthage are in fact the only states to which that character can be applied. In each of the two first there was a senate for life. The constitution of the senate in the last is less known. It is at least certain that it had some quality or other which rendered it an anchor against the popular fluctuations and that a smaller council drawn out of the senate was appointed not only for life but filled up vacancies itself. Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power; there are numerous instances of the former as well as the latter, and the former rather than the latter is most to be apprehended by the United States.

"In republican governments the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches and to render them by different modes of election and different principles of action as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit.

It

"Another defect to be supplied by the senate lies in the want of due acquaintance with the objects and principles of legislation. is not possible that an assembly of men called for the most part from pursuits of a private nature, continued in appointment for a short time, should, if left wholly to themselves, escape a variety of errors.

"The instability of the public councils arising from the rapid succession of new members, however qualified they may be, points out in the strongest manger the necessity of some stable institution in the government. To trace the mischievous effects of an unstable government would fill a volume.”

But the senates of Nebraska and of the twelve other states named being of equal terms and chosen at the same elections and by the same modes from virtually identical constituencies fulfill none of the purposes of a second or upper house cited by Hamilton.

As for the contention that no republic without a senate or second house has been long-lived-that is scarcely applicable to modern conditions. The fact that our states differ from all those cited in illustration of this point, in having written and firmly established fundamental laws or constitutions as a barrier against hasty and radical legislation all but destroys the force of the argument, and the radically different conditions of our society as compared with any other which has ever attempted republican government completes the destruction.

Moreover the distinction between the republics, so called, of Athens and Sparta, in respect to their duration is of no practical importance. If Sparta, beginning with the Lycurgan establishment of government may be said to have lived 500 years, Athens from the time of Solon lived about 400 years. Neither had a regular or steady republican government; the modern well defined system of representative bodies existed in neither. One of the legislative bodies of Athens consisted of a popular assembly which would be fatal to order or stability in our day even in our country; and on the other hand the Spartan government was not republican at all, for the popular assembly, composed of all citizens thirty years old and upwards, had only a veto power. It could reject the measures of the senate but could initiate Moreover during a portion of Sparta's existence the Ephors, five in number, governed the republic with despotic power. If, after having reached under a more popular government than that of Sparta, a development in art, literature and philosophy unrivalled in previous history, and which inform the art, literature and philosophy of our own times, Athens was at last overcome by the superior brute force of Sparta, it was only to be followed to political oblivion by her destroyer a short hundred years later.

none.

Republican Rome, like the later imperial Rome, was always on the border, or in the midst of disorder and revolution. At times the consuls proposed all laws which the senate might enact, and practically governed with despotic power. Again, the tribunes of the people or plebians were virtually the law makers and more or less absolute rulers of the republic. But the senators, irresponsible to the people, illustrated the conclusion to which enlightened reason would lead us by becoming distinguished more than for anything else as the frequent tools of ambitious military usurpers of the government or other conspirators against such semblance of popular liberty as Rome enjoyed. There is much more reason to believe that a single representative legislature, chosen by the people, unhampered and uncorrupted by the senate for life, depository of vice and defiance of popular rights, would have given Rome a free and stable government longer than she enjoyed the uncertain and capricious pretense of republican liberty by the help of an unrepublican senate, or even appreciably longer than the people of Athens maintained a real republic.

President John Adams passionately cites the career of the Italian republics of the middle ages as examples of the fatal effects of single legislatures, and Chancellor Kent singularly enough quotes this irrelevant nonsense with approval to sustain his own views in the Commentaries. I need scarcely refer to the general incapacity of the Latin race for self-government and to the particular sterility of the middle age Italian soil for real republicanism in support of this stricture. By parity of reasoning we might convince John Adams and Chancellor Kent that whereas the Christian religion of the Italian republics and of their time, ere it had become permeated, enlightened and humanized by the revival and spread of the old Greek culture, is known to us and to history chiefly as a machine for human butchery, therefore the Christianity of our day is bad and ought to be abolished.

Justice Story advocates the division of legislative bodies because it secures a deliberate review of the same measures by independent minds in different branches of the government and organized upon a different system of elections; because it affords great security to public liberty by requiring the co-operation of different bodies which can scarcely ever embrace the same sectional or local interests in the

same proportion as a single body.

"The value of such a separate

organization will of course be greatly enhanced the more the elements of which each body is composed differ from each other in the mode of choice in the qualifications and in the duration of office of the members."

"There should be dissimilarity in the genius of the two bodies to prevent sudden passion."

"The senate must be less numerous than the house and have a

proper, that is, longer term of office. Better acquaintance with legislation through longer terms would prevent mutability in public councils and would keep alive a sense of national character." This sense of national character perhaps was not foreseen by Mr. Story to be a sense that everybody is a millionaire, or at least that all senators are millionaires; that nobody who is not a millionaire can be a senator, and that if anybody is only a millionaire and nothing more, he is eligible to the senate and very likely to get there if he wants to. To this complexion of a plutocracy of commonplaces, has this senate come at last; conceived as it was by an avowed aristocratic monarchist and hater of popular government (Hamilton) and so chosen in that undemocratic way by the legislatures as would insure its degradation and growing condemnation by the people. Story repeats Hamilton's irrelevant imaginings about Rome, Sparta and Carthage and in substance much more of his obsolete undemocratic conjuring.

Chancellor Kent's arguments for the dual houses are in substance a copy of Hamilton's and Story's, based on the assumption that popular government is dangerous and ought to be hampered and emasculated as much as possible.

If we examine into the organization of the legislative bodies of European states we find almost universally illustrated the proposition that the second or upper house is established not for the influence the mere duplication or division of the legislature has on legislation, but to keep the titled, aristocratic and hereditary sheep separate from the ephemeral plebeian goats. Where the upper house is not composed of nobles or other aristocrats with hereditary privileges, among which is their right to seats in the legislature, then the members are distinguished from those of the lower house by the greater length of their terms, difference in mode of election, or other devices for secur

ment.

ing greater experience and less direct relation to the popular sentiThe senate of the French republic, for example, is composed of 225 members, chosen for nine years by the departments, and seventy-five life members.

The general legislature of Austro-Hungary consists of 120 delegates, sixty chosen annually by the Hungarian diet, and sixty by the Austrian reichsrath--forty by the lower and twenty by the upper house respectively.

The Austrian legislature consists of a house of lords composed of hereditary nobles and prelates and an unlimited number of life. members appointed by the emperor; and a house of deputies of members chosen by the provincial diets for six years. Even the provincial diets are composed of two classes-archbishops and bishops, and delegates elected annually.

The Hungarian diet comprises an upper house called the "table of magistrates," which has the formidable composition of three archdukes, thirty-one archbishops and church dignitaries, twelve imperial banner-bearers, fifty-seven presidents of counties, 219 counts, eighty barons and three regalists. The table of deputies or lower house is composed of 444 members, elected for three years, and which meets annually. Verily this legislature is after Hamilton's own heart, so broken into different branches as to render them by different modes of election and different principles of action as little connected with each other," etc.

The Prussian landtag or house of lords is composed of noble heads of chapters, heads of universities, burgomasters of towns of 50,000 'people, and unlimited members appointed by the king for life or a definite time. The house of deputies has 432 members elected for three years. The provincial assemblies merely apportion taxes; they cannot originate measures.

Bavaria's upper house or reichsrath comprises nobles, prelates and other members appointed at pleasure by the crown. The lower house is composed of deputies selected by electors chosen by the people.

The "storthing" of Norway is composed of members elected by deputies: one for every fifty inhabitants of towns, and one for every 100 inhabitants in rural districts. These deputies choose the members of the storthing from themselves or other qualified voters. This