stance of this clause. in the Constitution referred to is apparently about the same. In two of the states it is limited to local and private acts.

Speaking of this constitutional requirement, Chief Justice Gardiner said:

"Now, it is notorious that the discrepancies between the headings and subjects of our laws were so frequent, that a constitutional provision was deemed necessary to guard against imposition upon a class of legislators whose knowledge of bills was supposed to be gathered principally from the titles." *

As an example of an act "more spacious than its title," Lord Coke refers to the Statute of Uses, which "extends to jointures and dowers of women."

The prevalence of the evil is of a very old date. On this subject Mr. Sedgwick says:

"The evils which these constitutional provisions were intended to prevent are not of recent date. Mr. Barrington says (Observations on Statutes, 449): It becomes, indeed, impossible, when statutes relate to matters of a very miscellaneous nature, that the title be co-extensive with the views of the legislature. It is therefore to be wished that such acts of Parliament were distinct laws, and not thrown together in that very strange confusion which hath now obtained the name of a Hodge Podge act."†

It will be observed, however, that the device thus complained of is an obvious one; and as human nature has undergone no radical change, at least during the period covered by profane history, we might reasonably expect to discover the same evil existing in other times and countries where written statutes were enacted by legislative assemblies. We accordingly find that what is called in England as a

* Mayor us. Colgate, 2 Kern, 156; People vs. Hills, 35 N. Y. 449. † Sedgw, on Stat. and Const. Law, 53.

Hodge Podge act, was equally well known in the days of the Roman Republic under the equivalent name of a lex saturata; that long before the foundations of the common law were laid, and as early as the ninty-eighth year before the beginning of the Christain era, an effort was made to apply a practical check to the evil as it existed at that day in Rome.

The following account of the matter is given by a standard historian of the Roman Republic:

"The administration of that year was distinguished by an act in which both consuls concurred, and which is, therefore, marked in the title with their joint names. The Roman people had frequently experienced the defect of their forms. in their manner of enacting laws. Factious tribunes had it in their power to carry motions by surprise, and to pass in the same law a variety of clauses; and by obliging the people to pass or reject the whole in one vote, frequently obtained, under the favor of some popular clauses, acts of a very dangerous tendency. To prevent this abuse, it was now enacted, upon the motions of the consuls Cæcilius and Didius, that every proposed law should be made public three market-days before it could receive the assent of the people, that all of its different clauses should be separately voted, and that it should be lawful for the people to pass or reject the whole or any part of it."* Such was the preventive then applied.

Whenever a law was voted in violation of these provisions, it was decreed by the Senate to be void. Thus we learn from the oration of Cicero, pro domo sua, that the laws of Donsus were annulled on that account.

Though we possess no detailed report of the effect of these limitations on legislative power, we have reason to suppose that they were highly beneficial, as we find that many years * Ferguson, Hist. Roman Republic, book i., ch. 6.

afterwards, when the Republic was being wasted and ruined by the combined action of corruption and personal ambition, Cicero, in a letter to a friend, mentioned, among the more portentious evils that were beginning to prevail in the state, a neglect of the Cæcilian and Didian law.*

The author of the provision in the American constitutions designed to affect a like object and to produce a reformation in the titles of statutes, is said to have been General James Jackson, of Georgia, a man renowned in his day, both in war and in peace, but whose name is no longer known save to readers of history. This provision was suggested to him by a fraud that was perpetrated in 1795, by and upon the legislature of Georgia, by which a grant of land was procured to a few unprincipled persons, containing, to use the words of Jackson himself, "more square miles of unlocated territory than either of the German principalities, and of greater extent than some European kingdoms." Jackson, who was at that time a member of the United States Senate, and who was well acquainted with the theories of constitutional law then prevailing, wrote a series of letters in which he denounced this grant of land as being unconstitutional. Being afterwards Governor of Georgia, at the time the convention was held that formed the Constitution of 1798, it is said that it was upon his suggestion that the clause providing that no law should embrace more than one subject, which should be expressed in its title, was for the first time introduced into an American constitution.†

The act which gave rise to this measure was particularly obnoxious. It contained nothing to recommend it, and it incurred additional odium by the elaborate hypocrisy of its title, which was as follows:

"An act supplementary to an act for appropriating a part Ep. Ad. Att. ii. 9.

*

of the unlocated territory of the state for the payment of the late state troops, and for other purposes therein mentioned, declaring the right to the unappropriated territory thereof, for the protection and support of the frontiers of this state, and for other purposes therein mentioned." It will be observed that there was nothing in the title of the act but indications of an eager regard for important public interests; and yet it contained nothing more than an unblushing scheme of public plunder.

same.

The language used in the different state constitutions is not precisely alike, but the meaning serves to be about the In some of the later constitutions the word "object" has been inserted in place of "subject;" but the courts have not indicated any difference in the purposes had in view. In two of the states the provision is limited to private and local acts.

In Ohio it is held that the provision in question is directory merely, and that an act passed in violation of it is not void on that account.*

In California a like decision was made at an early day;+ but some doubt has been thrown on this ruling by later decisions in the same State.

In all the other states it is held that the provision is mandatory, and that a failure to comply with it renders an act void.

It might seem to be quite impossible to decide what is "one subject," and to say where any one subject begins and ends, seeing that all the branches of human knowledge, and particularly all the branches of the law, run into each other by insensible gradations, and are connected by innumerable analogies; and since, on the other hand, any subject

*Pim vs. Nicholson, 6 Ohio St. 176. + Washington vs. Page, 4 Cal. 388 Pierpont vs. Crouch, 10 Cal. 315; Cohen vs. Barrett, 5 id. 195; Flynn 28. Abbott, 16 id. 358; Barnes vs. Jones, 51 id. 303.

in the law may be analyzed and reduced to many separate and independent topics. The question of identity is one of the standing puzzles of metaphysics. But the law is eminently practical, possessing methods peculiarly its own, by reason of which it claims to rank as an independent science. Hence it is that very little difficulty has been experienced in the construction of this provision, though at times its application has given rise to doubt and dissent.

But in one case its object was apparently misconceived, and in such a way as apparently to impose on as accomplished a jurist as Theodore Sedgwick. The Supreme Court of Louisiana said:

"The title of an act often affords no clue to its contents. Important general principles were found placed in acts private or local in their operation. Provisions concerning matters of practice or judicial proceedings were sometimes included in the same statute with matters entirely foreign to them; the result of which was that on any important subject the statutes had become almost unintelligible, as they whose duty it had been to examine or act under them can well testify. To prevent any further accumulation to this chaotic mass was the object of the constitutional provision under consideration.*

Mr. Sedgwick refers to this passage with approval.†

But as reliance in searching for the contents of statutes is had upon indexes rather than upon their titles, it would appear that the inconvenience thus mentioned was a matter of minor consideration, hardly requiring of itself the interposition of a constitutional restriction.

All the other decisions concur in referring to more important objects to be attained. One of these was to prevent the uniting of various subjects, having no necessary or nat

* Walker vs. Caldwell, 4 La. An. 298.

+ Sedgw., Stat. and Const. Law, 519.