like his ingenuity. The arrangement he proposes would do good both ways. It would punish the sinners by taking their property without their consent, and at the same time reward the virtuous and enable them to multiply their good works. It would much improve the spiritual condition of the corporations, while it would fill the treasury of the Lord. But is this not doing evil that good may come? Have we-has anybody-has the State, a right to plunder with one hand in order to be charitable with another? Is it charity to transfer property from one person who owns it to another who don't? Is it for the honor of the church or its members to be the recipients of a forced benevolence, or creditable to the State to be the instrument of a pious fraud?"

THE COMMITTEE ON LEGISLATION

The Convention was a most remarkable gathering of distinguished men. William M. Meredith, whose symmetry of character is still the best model of the Philadelphia Bar, was unanimously elected President. His death, August 17, 1873, left the completion of the work to the presidency of John H. Walker.

One of the delegates at large was Governor Andrew G. Curtin, whose administration owed so much to the patriotic self-sacrifice of Meredith in accepting the post of Attorney General when his reputation for learning, ability and character were worth more to the Commonwealth and Nation than armies of men, or millions of money.

Judge George W. Woodward, like Judge Black, had prestige and experience from service on the Supreme Bench.

Many had served with Meredith in the Convention of 1837. To mention the noted names would be to call the roll. To us in this next generation it seems a gathering of giants. To those who are still with us we look up with awe as undoubted leaders and authority.

It is no disparagement to the other great men to say that Judge Black was among the foremost. His most important contribution to the result was as member of the Committee on Legislation, of which Judge Harry White was Chairman.

Article III was the result of the labors of this Committee and contains possibly the most important of the changes.

As finally adopted, it was a disappointment, in some particulars, to Judge Black; but still retains many of the safeguards earnestly advocated by him and which have been effective barriers against the assaults of injustice and corruption.

He did not sign the report of the Committee and stated his views at length in that speech, the power of which as delivered is still remembered by those who heard, and the reading of which must be suggestive to us of the present day.

THE BIRD SPEECH

(Debates of the Constitutional Convention, Vol. 2, page 485.)

"MR. CHAIRMAN: This is a subject upon which I speak with great reluctance. But I am deeply anxious about it. I do most devoutly believe that the destiny of this Commonwealth, and perhaps of the whole country, depends upon the decision to which this Convention may come. I beg a brief hearing.

"It will be admitted that the legislative function is by far the most important one in any free government. It is the supreme power of the State. All others are insignificant in comparison to it, inasmuch as all the others are bound to obey its will. The executive is absolutely controlled by it in all the details of his administration. It marks out the path in which he shall walk, and it is able to punish him severely for any departure from it. The Legislature cannot appoint the judges; but it can do more, it can command them what they shall do after they are appointed. All the legal justice we get is manufactured at the seat of government and sent down in bulk to the courts, where it is distributed among the people according to the wants and merits of each individual. The Legislature regulates the practice of the courts, makes and unmakes the rules of evidence and furnishes the standard of decision for every cause. It defines all public offences and supplies the remedy for every private wrong. All rights and all obligations are protected and enforced in the way that it prescribes, and cannot be either protected or enforced at all without its aid and assistance.

"The members of the Legislature are the custodians and trustees of all public property. They can sell it, or give it away, or they can increase it by making additional purchases. The taxing power enables them to descend as deep as they please into the pockets of the people of every class, and it has absolute control, and appropriates all the revenue after it is collected.

"What is a still higher consideration, they are the guardians of public morality. It depends upon them whether virtue shall be promoted, or vice and crime be encouraged. The theory is that the Legislature, being the supreme power of the State, commands what is right and prohibits what is wrong, and, in a certain sense, the mere command or prohibition does of itself make it right or wrong. What we are taught in the Bible is certainly true, that they who frame iniquity into a law, compel the people to become workers of iniquity.

"The time was, Mr. Chairman, when the State of Pennsylvania, then a mere colony, containing, perhaps, less than fifty thousand inhabitants, had a reputation throughout the earth for independence, justice, peace and good order-for everything that goes. to make up the happiness of an organized society. There was no portion of the world from which the eyes of the best and wisest men were not turned in admiration towards this community. All this resulted from the wise and just system of laws adopted by the illustrious founder of the colony. We lost our character as fast as we abandoned the principles upon which the early settlers conducted their legislation. As we can trace the grandeur, the honor, the high reputation of the State to the just laws of the earliest time, so we can read the history of her shame and her misfortune in the statute books of a later period. If we can now but unite the high tone of public morality which pervaded our legislation in the better days of the State with the wealth and science of the present generation, then you may hope to see this Commonwealth set higher than ever, the envy and the example of all the world. Without infusing into our new Constitution something which will have that effect, at least in degree, our institutions must, before a very long time, rot to pieces.

"What we want above all things upon the earth, is honest legislation; and when I say we want it, I use the word in the double sense of needing it, and lacking it.

"After all that has been said upon this floor, it cannot be denied that the Legislature of the State of Pennsylvania has habitually and constantly, for the last twenty-five years or more,

betrayed the trust reposed in its members; and this has gone so far, that we must have reform if we would not see our institutions perish before our eyes. The horrible character and extent of the evil, will be appreciated when you recall the solemn words of the gentleman from Dauphin (Mr. MacVeagh), the Chairman of the Committee on Legislature. His position in this Convention, to say nothing of his character and conscience, would make him extremely cautious not to be guilty, even of the slightest exaggeration, upon so grave and important a topic. He told us that corruption of the Legislature was a cancer at the heart of the State, which was eating its very life away. Another gentleman, the delegate from Erie (Mr. Walker) without intending to be at all condemnatory, but rather the reverse, declared that it was no use to swear the members of the Legislature, because they were, to his certain knowledge, so utterly degraded that they would take the oath and then immediately lay perjury upon their souls, without scruple and without hesitation, I believe him, for he certainly knows whereof he affirms. The evil fame of this thing has gone forth through the length and breadth of the country insomuch that the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Harry White), the Chairman of the Committee on Legislation, vouches for this statement: That when one of his colleagues in the Senate was traveling in Connecticut, and it became known that he was a member of our Legislature, that fact alone raised a presumption against his honesty so violent, that there was some hesitation about letting him go into an unoccupied room, lest the portable property to be found there might disappear when he went out. There was a time when membership of our State Legislature was a passport to honor and admiration everywhere, from a Parisian drawing room to the cottage of a peasant. Now that same Legislature is a stench in the nostrils of the whole world.

"There are about seventeen gentlemen on this floor who were formerly members of the Legislature. Of course they passed through the furnace of that temptation without the smell of fire upon their garments. While they have no sympathy with crime, they must naturally be anxious to make the best defence they can, for the reputation of that body to which they once belonged. But instead of a defence, all they can do is to hang their heads and acknowledge, with shame and sorrow, that the accusations are true.

"The cry against this corruption comes up, not only from every part of this house, but from every quarter of the Commonwealth. It is borne to us on the wings of every wind. In his

speech of this morning, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Harry White), acknowledged that the universal demand for a reform of these abuses had brought this Convention together, and without that it never would have been called. Nor is it a mere popular clamor. It is founded upon incontestible facts which have passed into the domain of history, and will stand there forever.

"As long ago as 1836, the Bank of the United States pushed its charter through the Legislature, partly by direct bribery and partly by a base combination of private interests, which were openly and shamelessly avowed upon the face of the bill itself. The speculation exploded in the course of a short time; but it scattered destruction everywhere, and brought desolation to a thousand firesides. It disgraced the character of the State; destroyed her credit; reduced her public securities to forty cents on the dollar; branded her with repudiation, and made her name a hissing by-word among all the nations. The perpetrators of that atrocious outrage were never called to any account, and their impunity was an invitation to all others to go and do likewise. For years afterwards, the other banks, combining themselves together, corrupted the Legislature and robbed the public according to the statutes in such case made and provided.

"In process of time another class of corporations grew up, composed of more adventurous men with larger capital and with a more plausible claim to public favor.

"I think that everybody who has looked at the history of our railroad system will admit that in its original organization it was intended for good and proper purposes. It promised necessary improvements which could not have been made in any other way. One of them, organized to make a road from Harrisburg to Pittsburg, undertook the duty under a charter, every part of which is marked with cautious wisdom. If that company had been kept within the limits originally assigned to it, its career must have been entirely beneficent. But its organization gave it an influence upon the Legislature which it used unsparingly. It swallowed up nearly all the property that the State ever had. It took it substantially as a gift; the five or six millions it paid was no consideration for the fifty or sixty millions it got. But that is not all; the gift of this immense domain was followed by a surrender, upon the part of the Commonwealth, of her right to collect her own revenue, amounting to millions more, and which belonged to her as much as the purse in your pocket belongs to you."