Most of the doctrines of the Republican party have become the fixed and irrevocable policy of the nation. Success has added to its ranks some bad elements, some men without convictions, who always drift to the winning side, as loose freight rolls with the lurch of the ship. Sometimes the party, in its pride of strength, has been wrong-headed, and has made mistakes. In some quarters corruption has crept into its ranks. But for all its sins, the severest criticisms usually come from its own members. The greatest peril that threatens it is the danger that it may be satisfied to rest upon its laurels, and forget that the conditions of national life are forever changing, its wants ever new, and that no party can live worthily which does not continue to represent the noblest aspirations and the most enlightened thoughts of its time. Let it not fall into the error of relying for its success upon the greater sins and follies of its antagonists. Let the time never come when the highest eulogy that can be pronounced on the Republican party will be that it is not so bad as the Democratic party.

Thus stand the two parties to-day. I see no sufficient reason why the popular verdict should be reversed in regard to either of them. Eleven years ago the people pronounced the sentence that expelled the Democracy from power; ten times the Democracy have been summoned to the public bar to show cause why that sentence should be revoked; ten times they have been heard by a patient and generous people, and ten times they have been remanded again to exile, with an impressive exhortation to repentance and good works. With unhesitating confidence the Republican party calls again for the verdict.

THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT AND

REPRESENTATION.

REMARKS MADE IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, DECEMBER 12, 1871.

THE bearing of the Fourteenth Amendment upon the apportionment of Representatives in Congress was considered by Mr. Garfield in his speech upon the Ninth Census, delivered December 16, 1869. The Fifteenth Amendment, which was declared in a proclamation of the Secretary of State, dated March 30, 1870, to have been duly ratified, rendered inoperative the Fourteenth, in so far as that related to the denial or abridgment of the right of suffrage on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Still that Amendment reached a large number of cases that were not taken into the account when the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. In some remarks upon the Apportionment Bill, made December 6, 1871, Mr. Garfield declared that this Amendment had radically changed the basis of representation. He stated once more the classes who were denied the suffrage in the various States, and said Congress would have to wait, before passing an apportionment bill, until the Census Office could furnish all the statistics bearing upon the subject. On the 12th of December he made the following remarks in Committee of the Whole. It may be added, however, that his representations were unheeded, and that the Fourteenth Amendment, in so far as respects the right of representation, has not been carried out in a single instance.

MR.

R. CHAIRMAN, -The language of this Amendment seems to me unfortunately chosen, and I do not believe that those who put it into the Constitution saw, at the time, the full scope and extent of its meaning. It was intended to declare, simply, that in any State where suffrage was denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, representation should be diminished in the ratio that

the number of male citizens, twenty-one years of age and upwards, to whom it was denied, bore to the total number of such citizens in the State. And that was a wise and just proposition. But I believe that when the article was pending in Congress, some one suggested, in the spirit of a similar criticism made by Madison in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, that the word "servitude" or "slavery" ought not to be named in the Constitution as existing, or as exercising any influence on the suffrage; and hence the negative form was adopted to avoid the use of an unpleasant word. But in adopting the negative form, with a view to the exclusion of only two classes, they did, as a matter of fact, exclude many classes who were manifestly not in the minds of the authors of the Amendment at the time. Thus they made the back of the blade as sharp as the edge. whole case is a striking illustration of the danger of attempting to reach an object indirectly, when there is a direct road which leads to the same end.

The

But, Mr. Chairman, the Constitution is here, in the words that have been quoted several times during this debate. Can we obey its requirements? If so, how? Or shall we neglect them? The gentleman from Pennsylvania1 says we may neglect it, because the Constitution does not execute itself, and Congress made no law to provide for taking the statistics necessary for its execution. I wish to call that gentleman's attention to a matter of history, which, I think, will answer his argument.

The House of Representatives passed, at the beginning of the last Congress, a very elaborate bill, in which the carrying out of this specific clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was provided for, and the method prescribed by which the statistics called for under the clause should be obtained. That bill passed the House after eleven days' debate, but the Senate came to the conclusion that the old law for taking the census, the law of 1850, was good enough, and the committee which had charge of the subject reported, on the 7th of February, 1870, a bill as a substitute for the House bill, in these words: "That the Secretary of the Interior be directed so to change the schedules and blanks to be used in enumerating the inhabitants of the United States in 1870, as to make the same conform to the Constitution of the United States."

These words were proposed as a substitute for the House bill

1 Mr. Mercur.

of some thirty or forty pages. After a long debate it was declared by Senators that this substitute was unnecessary; not that, as my friend from Pennsylvania affirms, the Constitution would not execute itself, but that it would be the duty of the Secretary of the Interior to make his schedules conform to the changes in the organic law without any new act of Congress. This view was discussed, and I have before me the speech of the Senator who had charge of the bill. That Senator expressed the opinion that no legislation was necessary, and that the Secretary of the Interior must consider the amendments to the Constitution as a part of the law which should guide him in his work. The Senate agreed to this view, and by an overwhelming vote laid both the bill of the House and the Senate substitute on the table. That substitute, as I have already shown, required the Secretary of the Interior to change the schedules and make them conform to the Constitution. We thus had from the Senate a solemn declaration that in their judgment no legislation was needed, and that the Secretary of the Interior must give such instructions, and must make such changes in the schedules, as the amendments to the Constitution required.

MR. WILLARD. I desire to ask the gentleman from Ohio, who was acting chairman of the Committee on the Census, if, in his judgment, the present census, as it is now in the office of the Secretary of the Interior, does not contain facts which will enable the House to make the apportionment in obedience to the requirements of the Constitutional Amendment? Georgia, for instance, requires a tax to be paid by all persons over twenty-two years of age. Now, the census will show how many male persons over twenty-two years of age there are in Georgia. A fair construction will bring that case under the Amendment. Will not the census show the fact? and may we not get at the basis of apportionment there by deducting that number?

I shall come to that in a moment, if my friend will allow me. If gentlemen have been following my remarks, they will see that the Secretary of the Interior, by this vote of the Senate, considered himself instructed as to his duties in the premises. Now, what did the Secretary proceed to do? The gentleman from Pennsylvania says that the law and schedules of 1850 were his only law, and that he had no right to change them. I call his attention to the fact that the Secretary of the Interior actually dropped out of the census of 1870 a whole schedule which stands in the law of 1850, which, according to the

gentleman's view, was the only law that the Secretary had. How could he drop one of the six schedules of the law under which he was acting? I answer, for the manifest reason that that schedule required him to take a census of slaves, and to collect special statistics in reference to slaves. But by the Thirteenth Amendment slavery had been abolished, and he was bound to take notice of the fact and govern himself accordingly. He did very properly drop that schedule. Now, if he took cognizance of that fact, he was equally bound to take cognizance of the further fact that the basis of representation had been changed by the Fourteenth Amendment, and he was bound to conform his schedule to this change. That he proceeded to do; and how? He knew that the House Committee on the Ninth Census had examined this subject, and reported a method of taking the census, so as to meet the demands of the Fourteenth Amendment as far as practicable. In their report that committee say:

"After much reflection, the committee could devise no better way than to add to the family schedule a column for recording those who are voters, and another with this heading, copied substantially from the Amendment: Citizens of the United States, being twenty-one years of age, whose right to vote is denied or abridged on other grounds than rebellion or crime.' It may be objected that this will allow the citizen to be a judge of the law as well as the fact, and that it will be difficult to get true and accurate answers. We can only say this is the best method that has been suggested."1

The Secretary of the Interior adopted these suggestions as being, in his judgment, the best method that he could take to carry out this clause of the Constitution. Those two columns, as my friend from Pennsylvania has said, are numbered nineteen and twenty in the Population Schedule which was used by the marshals throughout the country. The Secretary of the Interior, therefore, considering himself instructed by the Constitutional Amendment, took this method to get the required proportion from which to find the representative population of the United States. He has given us the result in the table now before us. The Secretary says, officially, that the result is not satisfactory nor trustworthy. I presume this is so, for the machinery of the old law was wholly inadequate to such work. But, correct or incorrect, this table is the only result we have

1 House of Representatives Report No. 3, January 18, 1870, p. 53