THE NEW YORK CONSTITUTION AND REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT ADDRESS BEFORE THE ECONOMIC CLUB OF NEW YORK At its thirty-third meeting at the Hotel Astor, on October 25, Mr. Root was the guest of honor of the Economic Club of New York. Mr. William E. Wilcox, the chairman of the meeting, in introducing Mr. Root as the presiding officer of the recent convention to revise the constitution of the state of New York, said: We are glad indeed to welcome here the distinguished gentleman who has rendered such lasting service to the country in the important offices he has held. To no man in our generation is the country under a greater debt of gratitude for the unselfish devotion he has shown to the state and to the nation, than to our distinguished guest. WHEN the constitutional convention, the result of whose labor is before you for your action as electors of the state of New York, assembled in Albany in April last, they found themselves holding a warrant of but weak potentiality, as comparatively few of the people of the state had voted for a convention. A very small majority of those who voted had cast their votes in the affirmative. Yet there was a duty imposed upon the members of the convention; and upon a survey of the field it seemed to them that there was something to be done; not merely the amendment here and there of specific provisions of the constitution of the state; not mending and patching in detail the provisions relating to the different departments of the state government, but of wide and serious importance. We all knew, and the members of the convention felt, that throughout the American Union there was dissatisfaction with the workings of state government. In a large part of the states of the Union that dissatisfaction had found expression in a partial abandonment of the system of representative government. In a great many of the states the people had turned from the attempt to establish by their votes from year to year satisfactory state governments, which through the workings of their legislative, executive, and judicial branches, should do the popular will, maintain order, secure justice, and preserve liberty, and had sought to substitute other methods of attaining their purposes: the initiative, the compulsory referendum, the more sudden and instant control over administrative and other judicial officers through the recall, — direct legislation as distinguished from representative legislation. Some of us who felt that representative government was the greatest gift of our race to the development of freedom, some of us who had been standing for years in opposition to the abandonment of representative government, felt that in that convention the duty pressing upon us was to show, if we could, that instead of abandoning representative government because of its defects and the evils which accompanied its exercise, we should seek to cure the evils by improving representative government, and bringing it back to the exercise of its full power and the performance of its great function; and the effort to give to the people of the state of New York an improvement of representative government which should be an answer to all those who were preaching the abandonment of representative government, is the keynote of the work of the convention; is the reason and the rationale of the constitution which is before you now for action. Of course, if legislation is to be direct, if the laws of the state or nation are to be made at the polls upon the initiative of any group of men who have ideas that they wish to propose, the dignity and the power of representative assemblies must decline. Of course, if that system of government is to prevail, the American system of government through representative assemblies must grow weaker and weaker; and if that system is not to prevail, representative assemblies must be made to do their work, to meet the well executed purpose and the will of the people whom they represent. It is that feature of the work of the convention which should, I think, appeal to this Economic Club; for you deal not merely with details, but with the philosophy of government, and with the broad, underlying principles which are to be applied. And I put to you, as the first great ground upon which the work of this convention is to be favorably regarded, that it is an effort, sincere and serious on the part of the one hundred and sixty-eight men elected by the people to do the work, to reinstate the representative government of our fathers in the position to which it is entitled, and to make it so good, so sound, so effective a government, that all demand for the abandoning of representative government and the substitution of direct legislation will pass away, and be repudiated. Now, we found certain manifest defects in our government. They were not peculiar to the government of the state of New York. They are to be found throughout the Union, in the government of most, if not all, of the states. Although there was no great majority of the people calling for a constitution, the members of the convention deemed it their duty to deal with these defects. Let me try, in the brief time I have, to state in outline what they were. In the first place, we found that under our judicial system the course of justice had come to be obstructed; it is slow and expensive and uncertain. It takes years for an honest man going into court to assert a right, or redress a wrong, to reach his conclusion. He finds himself obstructed, frustrated in the progress of his suit. If he reaches a favorable result, he finds himself sent back on appeal, and he is obliged to begin over again. Whenever the administration of justice is entrusted to a class and guild, the tendency always is to make it a mystery, to have it become more refined, and subtle, and technical; and as you understand the course of development of judicial procedure, you perceive that from time to time it has been necessary for the people, who want only simple justice, to step in and bring back the administration of their courts to their own simple basis. In 1846 the constitutional convention, tired of the technicality and subtlety of the common-law procedure, required that the procedure should be simplified, and from their requirement came the code of 1849, which, in a simple way, with three hundred and odd sections, introduced a simple procedure that went all over the country as the reform procedure, and which was followed in England conservative old England in 1873, by their Adjudicature Act. But now we have been going backwards in this state, and year by year the legislature, whose action was substituted for the old common law, has been adding to the code of procedure, piling up amendment after amendment with specific and particular rules, until we have a code of over three thousand sections, and until every act in a court of justice is regulated by detailed and meticulous statutory provisions; so that when a plain man goes into court, he has to meet at the hands of an acute and ingenious adversary the necessity of litigating upon a great variety of rules which, because they are imposed by the legislature, constitute statutory rights. He may be right in his claim for justice, and he may be wrong in his practice. Each of these rules is good enough, but all taken together result in a man's finding himself tangled in the form, denied his rights, compelled to litigate until his means are exhausted, so that it is hardly worth his while to go into court. And again, as was done in 1846, as was done in England in 1873, again we need to bring our judicial procedure back to the simple basis of a plain, honest citizen's intelligence. We have got our procedure regulated according to the trained, refined, subtle, ingenious intellect of the best practiced lawyers, and it is all wrong. Our procedure ought to be based upon the common intelligence of the farmer, the merchant, and the laborer. And there is no reason why it should not be. I say it not without experience in legal procedure. There is no reason why a plain, honest man should not be permitted to go into court and tell his story and have the judge before whom he comes permitted to do justice in that particular case, unhampered by a great variety of statutory rules. And in this convention, acting upon the teaching of the great experience of its members, and following the philosophy of the history of the development of the law, we undertook by plain and adequate provisions to compel the restoration of our judicial procedure to that plain basis of honesty and opportunity. We found that there had been a vast increase of the expenditures of the state, as well as of the indebtedness of the state; expenditures which had increased from twelve million dollars a year for a number of years after the last convention, to forty-two million dollars a year in the last year. Debts amounting from seven million dollars upwards to one hundred and eighty-six million dollars, amounting to a mortgage for the state and municipal debts, excluding the debt of New York City, of over thirty dollars an acre of the lands of the state, vastly outstripping the increasing population and vastly outstripping the increase in wealth. We found a general belief, clearly with some foundation, that much of the money raised by this enormous increase of debt, had been expended without due return to the people of the state. Successive administrations of the same party, administrations of different parties, all had contributed their part toward this increase of debt; and we looked into the system |