of single sections. In 1874, when a large number of amendments were voted upon contemporaneously, the legislature provided for separate submission of amendments relating to different topics. The advantage of this method of amendment is very great; but it suffers from one serious drawback to complete usefulness, namely, that amendments which originate in legislative resolutions do not ordinarily attract sufficient public attention, although the constitution requires that they shall be published for three months prior to the election of the second legislature whose approval is needed before they can be submitted to the people. It is probable that comparatively few voters were aware until they reached the polls, last November, that a constitutional amendment, relating to the formation of a court to facilitate the disposition of appeals to the Court of Appeals, was then to be voted upon.

Public indifference to legislative proceedings operates injuriously in another mode. Many valuable amendments have been lost in the second legislature, for example, the resolutions favoring reforms in city government and the passage of general laws for the incorporation of cities, which in various phases were approved by the first legislature but never carried through another. Without pronouncing that any of these resolutions merited adoption and approval by the electors, it may be justly said that an alert public opinion would never have allowed the people to be thwarted of a chance to vote upon these propositions. If these resolutions were defeated by an adverse public sentiment expressed in a legislature elected with a view to their consideration, there would be no ground of complaint; but that was not their fate; they were lost because politicians were afraid of the effects of their adoption. In fact, the constitutional requirement for submission of amendments to a second legislature has acted as a hindrance to constitutional reform.

A third method of amendment, which is but a modification of the legislative method, has been twice employed in this state, viz. the appointment of constitutional commissions to propose amendments to the legislature. Such commissions are likely to contain men of more abundant talent and experi

ence than our ordinary legislatures exhibit; and, as their number is small, their deliberations are usually conducted with more order and advantage than attend the proceedings of a convention. Judge Jameson has questioned the constitutionality of amendments originating in commissions not expressly provided for in the organic law; but there does not seem to be any reason for assuming that a commission exercises more coercion over a legislature than the public sentiment to which all commissions and legislatures are alike sensitive and alike amenable.

Professor Dicey, in his work on the English constitution, demonstrates the complete flexibility of an unwritten constitution such as that of Great Britain. In point of fact the constitution of a state like New York, open to amendments by either of two methods, approximates closely to the mobility of an unwritten organic law.

Although the people of the state voted two years ago to call a constitutional convention, it may fairly be doubted whether a convention for a general revision of the constitution is necessary. Numerous improvements in our fundamental law appear to be demanded in some quarters; and if it were a question of making a perfect theoretical constitution for the state, doubtless many apparently advantageous changes might be suggested. But prudence dictates that long-established governments should not be changed for light and transient causes. Public sentiment, as Burke was among the first to observe, should be the sole source of alterations in law, and a wise conservatism waits until its tones are imperative. If any amendment is clearly demanded by the people of the state, particularly by our municipalities, and chiefly by the metropolis, which, through the sturdy independence of its late mayor, has recently forced from the state government an acknowledgment of the city's exclusive control over its own affairs, it is a constitutional guaranty to cities of the prerogative of local government. It would be easy to demonstrate how deep a hold the doctrine of local government possesses in this country; how, in many states, municipal and town independence is as old as the central authority. The common legal theory of a municipal corporation, as a creature

whose existence may be terminated and whose powers may be revoked by the arbitrary fiat of the state, is to be taken in connection with the larger political truth, that local government is not the creation of state government and that, were the state to revoke a municipal charter, it would break with all just traditions if it should assume to govern the city by central authority.

Municipal reform will, perhaps, never be completed until the mayor of a city becomes its chief administrative officer in fact. as well as in name. The theory of vesting the appointment of heads of departments exclusively in the mayor is that responsibility is thus concentrated in the executive and that, as the executive is amenable to the people at short intervals, the control of the administrative machinery is kept fairly in the popular grip. But the theory logically requires that the amplest power of removal should also be given to the mayor. Executive responsibility is defied and brought to naught when a mayor can make an officer but cannot unmake him. The bureau chief then becomes a political Frankenstein. What gave the government of Brooklyn its cohesion during Seth Low's administration was that each chief of department took his office under a pledge to surrender it whenever the mayor should demand his resignation. But a constitutional acknowledgment of municipal independence is one thing; the details of government, another. If cities are ensured the exclusive management of their own local concerns, they may be trusted to work out a system of administration adapted to their conditions and requirements.

J. HAMPDEN DOUGHERTY.

DECISIONS OF THE COURTS IN CONSPIRACY

AND BOYCOTT CASES.

HE courts have come into contact with the labor move

THE

ment, as such, in one way only. This has been in the decisions they have been called upon to give on the applicability of the common-law offence of conspiracy. The crime of conspiracy has been generally recognized as one of the offences which has been most difficult to define in the common law, a system always somewhat vague in its definitions. The theory seems to have been that combinations of men are so fraught with possibilities of injury to society and of oppression to individuals that they are to be looked upon with general suspicion by the courts. If at any time a combination proposes to itself unlawful ends or unlawful means to its ends, or becomes injurious to society or oppressive to individuals, the combination itself is to be punished as criminal, irrespective of any acts performed by it. The application of this doctrine to combinations of workmen has been made in a series of cases during the last and the present century in England, and in the American cases which form the subject of this paper.

There are three characteristics of this branch of conspiracy law which it is of importance to notice here. First, the offence of conspiracy has been defined almost entirely by the judges, not by the legislators. Of this Judge Stephens, in his history of the common law, says: “In a legal point of view no part of the whole story is so remarkable as the part played by the judges in defining and indeed in a sense creating the offence of conspiracy." Secondly, the English decisions, and through their influence our own, have been modified largely by the statutes of laborers and the combination laws, which long stood on the English statute books as a striking instance of class legislation and a reversal of the real common law. Thirdly, there is a recognized want of agreement in the decisions as to

the bases of criminality, though there is a general consistency in the conclusions reached. In many cases the judges express an entire dissent from the reasonings of the previous jurists, at the same time that they acknowledge that they have reached practically the same conclusion.

Conspiracy cases have arisen in something like the following way. When a dispute has arisen between an employer and his employees the latter have combined to strike, or, as in some of the recent cases, have declared a boycott until the employer should grant their claims. The employer, occasionally, in such a case, instead of leaving it to a mere trial of strength, has either applied to the courts for an injunction against the action of the employees, or has made a complaint which has resulted in an indictment for conspiracy.

Of such cases there have been in our national history about forty. They fall chronologically into three distinct groups: some twelve cases extending over a period of forty years, from the beginning of the century to 1840; then, after a long intervening period, six or eight cases immediately after the war, in 1867, 1868 and 1869; again, after almost twenty years more of immunity from such prosecutions, a large number, about twenty, in the last three years, 1886, 1887 and 1888, of which some are still before the courts. The reason for this periodicity is not apparent. The cessation of the early series of cases may perhaps be explained partly by the rise of a democratic and equalizing spirit characteristic of that time, partly by the more liberal spirit shown by the judges in the last two decisions. Popular self-assertion, the decay of many of the aristocratic ideas of the colonial and early national period and the substitution for them of a strong feeling of equality of classes, are striking characteristics of the period just before and just after 1840. Typical of the time are such occurrences as the anti-rent and native American riots, Dorr's rebellion, and the political revolution of 1840. At the same time, in at least two decisions, that of the Connecticut Carpet Weavers in 1833,1 and Commonwealth of Massa

1 Case of the Hartford Carpet Weavers. Printed at Hartford, 1836. Niles' Register, Sept. 27, 1834.