tions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument. (Marbery vs. Madison, I Crouch 137, Dec. 1803.)

LINCOLN AND THE DRED SCOTT DECISION.

A close study of the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, during his contest with Judge Douglas in 1858, will show that he criticised the Dred Scott Decision as severely as Roosevelt has some of the decisions of the Supreme Court today in the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust cases. He was not afraid to arraign Chief Justice Taney before the bar of public opinion.

He said: "I now repeat my opposition to the Dred Scott Decision-If I were in Congress and a vote should come up on a question whether slavery should be prohibited in a new territory, in spite of the Dred Scott Decision, I would vote that it should.'"

"The sacredness that Judge Douglas threw around this decision, is a degree of sacredness that has never been thrown before around any other decision".

"A National Bank was declared unconstitutional-then General Jackson (who was president) said that 'the Supreme Court had no right to lay down a rule to govern a co-ordinate branch of the government, the members of which had sworn to support the Constitution,-that each member had sworn to support the Constitution as he understood it.""

"We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this". "We offer no resistance to it".

"Chief Justice Taney insists that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made the Declaration of Independence, of the Constitution of the United States. On the contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen states free negroes were voters."

The election of Lincoln, for whom I voted, was a protest against the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case. The result was that slavery was never extended into the territories, and this decision was annulled by the will of the majority, carried out through Abraham Lincoln in the war for the Union against the secessionists.

Later the Constitution itself was changed after a great Civil War, and negroes were given the right of suffrage and given the liberty of moving about anywhere in the United States.

The people will continue to express and carry out their will in reference to all issues that affect their interests. Neither Canadian nor English courts can set aside legislative acts.

Some say the people are not competent to rule themselves in the United States through the right of universal suffrage, or be trusted with a referendum, but it so happens that the people now have universal suffrage and who is going to take it from them? They are sovereign and will fight for the rights they now possess and hold them as firmly as those who have vast estates will hold them.

The people will continue to express their will in reference to all present and future questions that affect them. The trusts and the high tariff for special interests will be met by them in one way or another and their purpose will not be thwarted by courts or legislative bodies which misrepresent them.

The right of the extension of slavery into the territories of the United States and other questions relating to this incident should have been submitted by the referendum to the citizens of the entire country, who alone possess the sovereign power. If they had decided in the negative that would have settled the case and prevented the civil war. This would have been the method used in Switzerland, where the referendum and initiative are institutions which are considered the powerful weapons of democ

racy.

Á mere majority of the judges of the Supreme court should not have the right to take away or nullify the sovereign power of the people expressed through congress, as was attempted in the Dred Scott decision.

The entire question of high tariff and the right of powerful trusts to combine and destroy competition and override the will of the people should now be submitted to the citizens of the United States by referendum.

THE "GRANDFATHER CLAUSE”—LITERARY DIGEST, JULY 3, 1915.

Despite the fact that the Supreme Court decisions in the Oklahoma and Maryland "grandfather-clause" cases are declared by the New York Evening Post (Ind.) to "mean as much forward as the Dred Scott case did backward," and are generally regarded as an epochal victory for the colored citizen, we are reminded. by more than one paper that they do not actually give the vote to one negro who does not possess it already. What they do, however, is to strike at discrimination in certain Southern States by taking away the franchise from illiterate whites who have

hitherto been exempted from educational or property tests to which all negro voters had to submit. The Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States provides that "the right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition or servitude," and the so-called "grandfather clause" is one of many devices resorted to by Southern States to evade this law. The plan, in a nutshell, is to permit a special exemption from property or literacy tests to descendants of persons who could vote before the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted. The unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, handed down by Chief Justice White, himself a Southerner and a veteran of the Confederate Army, now declares this device unconstitutional because it "recreated the very conditions which the Fifteenth Amendment was intended to destroy." In full agreement with Chief Justice White were two other Southerners-Justice Lamar and Justice McReynolds.

"Those States which now have this 'grandfather clause' in their constitutions or their laws must either enforce the literacy test against whites as well as negroes, or broaden their voting qualifications," notes the New York Herald (Ind.). But the New York Sun (Ind.) assures its readers that "the political hue of the South will remain white," and that this decision "will not deliver any State government to the negro race." "It is conceivable," the same paper adds, "that in some communities the exclusion of black men's votes will be less complete in consequence of the decision, but the practical effect will be of no moment." The New York Times (Ind. Dem.) recalls how negro rule in a section of North Carolina was overturned by a white mob in a riot in which twelve negroes and three white men were shot. "Order and the white man," it adds, "have reigned in North Carolina ever since."

"This incident, the last of the kind which was of any great importance, is referred to here to show how persistent is the legacy of crime and violence left by the misguided 'statesmen' of reconstruction. The white man will rule his land. The only question left by the Supreme Court's decision is how he will rule it."

Even so old and loyal a champion of the negro as the New York Evening Post expresses "sympathy with the South in the efforts it will now have to make to adjust itself to the new conditions," but it holds that "if we are in peril from an ignorant vote, the remedy is not to suppress it, but to be just and fair to it and to educate it," so that "a mighty impulse to the already powerful movement for better common-school education in the South ought to follow the Supreme Court decision."

Turning to the Southern press, we find very little excitement. Thus the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot (Dem.) remarks that the Supreme Court could not have arrived at any other conclusion "unless prepared to set aside the Fifteenth Amendment"; while the Richmond News Leader (Dem.), after admitting that the decision "may be a temporary embarrassment," adds:

"It will certainly be a permanent benefit in that it shows the line a State may follow in restricting its franchise. The future. of the ballot in the South is made plainer."

Says another Richmond paper, The Times-Despatch (Dem.): "The clause, in the main, was a concession to the illiterate white voter, and to that extent placed a premium on ignorance. It may be that Southern States will have to abolish that premium, by which outcome of the long litigation they should not now be moved to special anguish.

"The old-style 'grandfather clauses' have served their purpose -necessary in their day, but no longer vital to the South's protection. It is just as well they are to pass."

The Baltimore News (Ind.) criticizes Oklahoma and Maryland, "States in which there is no serious negro-problem," for "stirring up once more the quarrel over negro suffrage in the South." Summing up in the Oklahoma case, Chief Justice White said, in part:

"There seems no escape from the conclusion that to hold that there was even possibility for dispute on the subject would be but to declare that the Fifteenth Amendment not only had not the self-executing power which it has been recognized to have from the beginning, but that its provisions were wholly inoperative because susceptible of being rendered inapplicable by mere forms of expression embodying no exercise of judgment and resting upon no discernible reason other than the purpose to disregard the prohibitions of the Amendment by creating a standard of voting which on its face was in substance but a revitalization of the conditions which, when they prevailed. in the past, had been destroyed by the self-operative force of the Amendment.

"We are unable to discover how, unless the prohibitions of the Fifteenth Amendment were considered, the slightest reason was afforded for basing the classification upon a period of time prior to the Fifteenth Amendment."

VISCOUNT JAMES BRYCE ON THE UNITED STATES CABINET.

The Hon. James Bryce says: that,

In the government of the United States there is no such

thing as a cabinet in the English sense of the term. He calls attention to the remarkable difference which exists between the great officers of state in America and the similar officers in the free states of Europe."

There could be no harm in giving the members of the cabinet seats of the House or the Senate, and permitting them to participate in the debates in Congress so that they could give their opinions direct in either house on questions relating to their several departments.

In most constitutional governments in Europe, if the ministry is in conflict with the popular branch of the legislative department it resigns and a new ministry is chosen, or the house dissolves and another election is held. This enables the will of the people to be carried out. It surely is more expedient to change the ministry than to wait for a regular election of a president who chooses his cabinet, when the new administration is expected to carry out the popular demand expressed by his election.

As I have already observed, we in Great Britain, are in reality far more of a democracy than you are. The will of the people declared in an election of the members of the House of Commons, is able to act more quickly, more promptly, with a more tremendous and compelling force in Britain than it can be here.

I have another and a far brighter vision before my gaze. It may be but a vision, but I will cherish it. I see one vast confederation, stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic westward to the calmer waters of the Pacific main; and I see one people and one language and one face, and one law used over all that wide continent, the home of freedom, and a refuge for the oppressed in every race and in every clime.

He says: "The separation of the legislative and executive departments has been carried too far by the custom which does not allow the ministers of the president access to the floors of Congress to speak and to be interrogated there. It is not a part of the constitution, and Congress has therefore the power at any time to alter it if it should think fit."

Switzerland, like you, does not permit the members of the administration, which there consists of a body of seven persons called the Federal Council, to be elected to and sit in either house of its federal legislature; but it permits them and encourages them to be present in either house, and when I have attended the debates of the federal legislature in Switzerland, I have seen the members of the Federal Council, sometimes in one house and sometimes in the other interrogating and answering questions."