INSTITUTIONAL LAW

Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 29, 1900.

The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. R. 8245) temporarily to provide revenues for the relief of the island of Porto Rico, and for other purposes

Mr. Beveridge said:

O treat Porto Rico as we treat Hawaii; to deal with the latter as we deal with the Philippines; to apply to all without delay the same fixed formula of laws which custom and the intention of statehood has prescribed for our territories from which our states are formed, is a proposition the unwisdom of which appears in its very

statement.

Our Constitution does not so manacle our hands and narrow our vision. It is no such charter of death. Our fathers did not so anchor us within a narrow harbor when the high seas call us. No! Our Constitution is a chart by which we sail all seas and make all ports. We must provide for our possessions according to the wisdom of events according to the common sense of situations. The people of each are unlike the people of any other; none of them is like the American pioneers who settled our continental wilderness. We must adopt measures fitting the condition and the necessities of each and

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change those measures as conditions and necessities

change.

According to the Opposition, the Constitution ties our hands and nullifies our understanding; according to the Government, the Constitution places in our hands the commission of all needful powers.

The Government says that we reserve the future for the future, but that for the present we hold these islands as a trust, dealing with them as wisdom and righteousness from day to day shall dictate, developing them into gardens, their inhabitants into happy and prosperous peoples; and when the time shall come, if ever, that American ideas, American methods, and the American spirit change the habit of their minds, and their conception of government, then our successors in the American Congress may admit them into or reject them from the blood of our national life, as the wisdom and justice of posterity may determine.

In a word, the question is whether the Constitution gives Congress a free hand over our possessions, or whether, if we retain them, the Constitution gives them a free hand over us.

We are like a farmer with a farm, part adapted to corn, part to fruit, part to woodland pasture, part a swamp which draining will render fertile, part a highland which irrigation will make productive. We say that the farmer must have a free hand to deal with each portion of that farm as its situation and quality requires. The Opposition says that, over all, uniform methods must be employed, the same treatment given. The parable of the sower who sowed alike by the wayside, among thorns, in stony places as well as in prepared ground is repeated

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here in the attitude of those who seek to scatter selfgovernment and the Constitution on the people of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Porto Rico, in equal measure, no matter whether they are prepared for it or not, with the bestowal upon the brothers of our blood in our American territories.

We are like a modern business man with many and dissimilar enterprises. The Opposition says he must deal with all alike, must devise and apply a common system to different situations; we declare that he should have a free will and a constructive mind, to meet each situation with appropriate and therefore different action.

The exact situation is, for us, unprecedented. Our action must be without example in our own history. The decisions of our Supreme Court are not to the precise point, and where analogy applies those decisions to the present situation they are conflicting and confused. This is rather fortunate than the reverse. New situations should be met with new methods. Search for precedents where none can exist, effort to apply opinions of judges to a condition not of their time nor dreamed of when they wrote those opinions, is not helpful. There are some cases containing expressions which appear to be on one side of the present controversy and others containing passages apparently on the other side; but none of them completely illumines the new fields of effort and of duty into which we have entered.

I admit and assert the authority of precedent. I understand that the philosophy upon which the authority of precedent rests is as deep as civilization itself. But that very philosophy demands that precedents shall apply only to like situations and that the solutions of new problems

shall not be hampered by fitting them into inapplicable precedents. The very reason of precedent demands the creation of new precedents out of new occasions. Surely we can see more clearly the situation before us with our eyes than with the eyes of the fathers, those eyes looking not at our problems, but at theirs.

Precedent has its rightful authority, but it has its danger, too. It sanctifies the past, but, used beyond its rightful sphere, it forbids the future. China, we say, is living in the past. She is living in her precedents. She inquires not the best way; she asks only the way of the fathers. She is reminiscent; not inventive. Her memory is abnormal; her initiative is atrophied. Drugged with the opium of precedent, she sits and dreams of ancient glories and the ancient gods. The science of the modern world is a lie to her, because the fathers knew it not. Our medicines are poison, because they are not inherited from the distant past; and enchantment is efficacious still, because her ancestry dealt with the magic of the night. Spirits of evil fly upon the air, and workmen fix charms upon buildings where they labor, to frighten the fell influences of the nether world, because their fathers did the like for a thousand years.

Precedent has shod with lead the feet of this puissant people and put upon her eyelids the somnolent spell of dreams. Happy for China when she shall shake that slumber from her blood, and her people, refreshed and inspired by the energy of progress, shall meet each new emergency, opportunity, and duty by the wisdom of a living mind, and not by the wisdom of a brain which, for a thousand years, has been thoughtless dust, and, even when quick and vivid, was solving, not the problems

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of to-day, but those of the entombed and storied centuries. Can we, therefore, unaided by judicial decisions, find in the Constitution the free hand needful for our new task?

Is this great movement to halt because a partizan faction so construes our Constitution as to forbid it? And halt it must, if we find not the amplest power, expressed or implied, in our Constitution; for we, above all the peoples of the world, are a people of law, and our Constitution is the supreme ordinance of national life.

But the Constitution does give us power as ample as our present opportunities; power so express and emphatic that the Opposition dare not quote it, lest it confound them, but fly to subtleties and refinements of other sections not bearing on the matter in dispute; power so clear that it carries almost the authority of command; power written through the instinctive anticipation of our development; power penned through the racial impulse in the blood of the fathers; power so complete, emphatic, and unusual that there is in it the suggestion of duty.

"The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States."— Constitution of the United States, Article 4, section 3.

Of course Congress, in exercising this power, must pass laws in the manner prescribed in the Constitution. The Constitution determines the method of Congressional action in exercising all Congressional powers. And the Constitution fixes certain fundamental general limitations to and absolute general prohibitions on the power of Congress; and when Congress makes "needful rules and regulations respecting territory or other property be