before adjournment. Missouri (1875), Colorado (1876), Louisi.ana (1879), Montana (1889), Wyoming (1889), and Kentucky (1890), followed Pennsylvania in substance. Mississippi (1890) strengthened the requirement by stipulating that the report should be "in writing." Then Alabama, in 1901, stiffened its provision into: "No bill shall become a law until it shall have been referred to a standing committee of each House, acted upon by such committee in session, and returned therefrom, which fact shall affirmatively appear upon the Journal of each House." Notice that the reference is to be to a standing committee. Here was official and formal discard of the special or select committee system. Virginia, however, though in the following year copying the Alabama requirement of reference to a committee of each House, and report therefrom, did not specify "standing" committee; and evidently thought the call for a Journal entry superfluous.

It is interesting to note that the progress of the French Chamber of Deputies in the matter of standing committees has been exactly like ours, though following it by many years. In 1882, against bitter opposition, a standing committee on the army was created. A committee on the tariff, appointed in 1890, aroused less hostility. By 1896 there were sixteen standing committees, and only seventy-one special committees; of 1356 projects submitted to committees, 1219 went to standing committees, only 137 to special committees.

Italy, Belgium, and Holland were, at any rate up to the time of the World War, following with slight modifications and difference in detail the French system as it was worked before the increase of standing committees. The main points of this system may be briefly summarized as follows: first, the immediate reference of a bill to committee without previous discussion in the Chamber; secondly, the detailed examination of the bill in a small special committee elected by the Chamber, which for this purpose is divided afresh every month by lot into Offices or Sections; thirdly, the discussion of the bill in the Chamber after report from the committee, in a single stage or deliberation, divided into two "phases," (a) a general discussion of the principles (called the "general discussion"), and (b) a detailed discussion of the clauses or articles and amendments (called "the special discussion"), followed immediately by a final vote on the whole

bill.

The Swedish Riksdag has six permanent joint committees, with an equal number of members from each Chamber. For matters not coming normally under their jurisdiction, temporary committees are appointed.

CHAPTER V

COMMITTEE SELECTION

NOWADAYS when any group of men is transacting business with some regard to parliamentary forms, but without such rules as are found in legislative bodies, if a motion for a committee prevails, the chances are that the chairman will ask, "How shall the committee be appointed?" Thereupon somebody may answer: "From the floor." Here is a survival of a very ancient practice. For many, many years in Parliament and in most of the American legislating bodies it was the custom for members, each as he could get the chance, to call out the names of those they wanted on committees. More than three centuries ago D'Ewes told how it was done in Parliament: "The Speaker did put the House in mind, to name committees. And thereupon every one of the House that listed, did name such other Members of the same, to be of the Committee, as they thought, fit; and the Clerk either did, or ought to have written down as many of them, as he conveniently could; and when a convenient number of the Committees named, were set down by the Clerk, then did the Speaker move the House to name the time and place, when and where they should meet."

Remember that these were "select" committees. The name, indeed, may have been given in order to discriminate between "select" and "elect." The account of D'Ewes does not indicate that the House voted on their membership at all, but the first clear description of the method of choice in Massachusetts indicates an element of election. The entry in the Journal of the House of Deputies for June 4, 1644, reads: "It is voted & ordred, to bee att ye libertie of each member of this howse (uppon ye choyce of committees for ye ripeninge of businesses) to nominate whome they please for ye said committees, & after such libertie improved, the Speaker (for ye time beeinge) shall put to vote, in order, all such as are soe nominated, & that nomber of persons as shalbee agreed uppon, (to bee of ye committee,) that shall have most voyces, shalbee accompted as men chosen by ye howse." Just when the Speaker began to share in the nominating it 1 Records of the Colony of the Mass. Bay in N.E., III, 4.

would be impossible to determine. A member himself, there was no reason why he should not exercise the privilege as well as any other member, and the prestige of his office would naturally give him the right of way. Evidently that had been recognized long before 1682, for we find the Journal of the Virginia House of Burgesses recording in that year, April 22: "The question whether according to the usuall Custome the speaker of the house have the first nomination of the members of the house for a Committee and the house to allow or disapprove of the same, or whether the first nomination of the Committee be by the house, Resolved that the first nomination of the members for a Committee be (as heretofore hath bin) first by the speaker to be allowed or disallowed as they please." One of the rules adopted for the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1703 read: "That the Speaker have Power to nominate Persons for Committees; and that none who are nominated, refuse the Service; not that any of the Members shall be hereby debarr'd of their Privilege of nominating Persons if they think fit, or rejecting such as are by the Speaker nominated; in which cases the Opinion of the House shall rule."

It may have been the importance reached by committees in the Revolutionary period that led to the development of a more orderly system of choice. In that period appear, in Massachusetts and New Hampshire at least, rules directing that no member should nominate more than one person for a committee, "provided the person by him first nominated be chosen." Occasionally committees were chosen by ballot; that was the method used in the Federal Convention of 1787. More commonly the tendency was to entrust the selection to the Speaker. The First Congress started off with a combination of the two methods; the Speaker was to appoint committees of three or less; larger committees were to be chosen by ballot, a majority choice being required on the first ballot, and thereafter plurality. This proved awkward and was so unsatisfactory that in the following January the House changed the rule so that the Speaker should name all committees, unless otherwise specially directed by the House, in which case the choice should be by ballot. At the opening of the Second Congress this was simplified into: "The Speaker shall appoint committees until the House shall otherwise determine."

With 1806 began the fight against this course that was to go Hening, Statutes at Large, 1, 41.

on spasmodically for more than a century. "For the purpose hereafter of keeping the business of the House of Representatives within its own power," James Sloan of New Jersey moved that all standing committees should be chosen by ballot, and should choose their own chairmen. The shot was aimed at John Randolph, center of so many episodes of parliamentary interest. The arrogant Virginian had held back or refused to make a committee report, and one of Sloan's purposes, he said, was "to prevent in future the most important business of the nation from being retarded by a chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, or of any other committee," his intimation being that Randolph had kept for months in his pocket or locked in his desk the estimates for the appropriations necessary for the ensuing year. The motion was tabled, but Sloan renewed it at the opening of the next session and came within an ace of carrying it, the vote being 42 to 44. It is said the Northern Republicans feared Randolph's reappointment as Chairman of Ways and Means, and sought to prevent it by taking the appointing power away from the Speaker. Gallatin, however, was much put out because Speaker Varnum replaced Randolph with Campbell of Tennessee.

Thomas Blount of Tennessee tried unsuccessfully for elected committees at the beginning of the next Congress. No better fortune came in May of 1809 to the aggressive Matthew Lyon, who had moved from Vermont to Kentucky and thence returned to Congress. Lyon argued that the "course proposed would be more respectful to the nation; and that the person so appointed would feel a greater responsibility to the House." He could, however, muster to his support only 41 votes against 67. Thereafter for a long time attempts to change the system were few and were confined to specific instances of special committees. In 1832 Speaker Stevenson came very near an affront when Erastus Root moved for the choice by ballot of a special committee on the Bank of the United States. Before the result of the vote was announced a Mississippi man changed his vote, making a tie, which the Speaker broke by giving the casting vote, of course for his prerogative.

In December of 1849 Howell Cobb of Georgia, Democrat, was elected Speaker by two votes over Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts, Whig, on the sixty-third ballot, when the strain on the endurance of members had driven them to agree upon plu