sentatives. Massachusetts uses the joint-committee system for the bulk of the work. The Senate and House have separately organized committees on Rules, Judiciary, and Ways and Means (though they sometimes sit jointly), and a few small routine committees, but the great mass of the business is handled by thirty joint committees, ten of which are made up of three Senators and eight Representatives each, and the other twenty of four Senators and eleven Representatives each. In 1911 the committees of the Wisconsin Senate were reorganized and were reduced in number from twenty working committees to five. This gave each of the five a larger membership and placed each Senator on but one working committee. In the "Senate Manual" of 1913, Chief Clerk F. M. Wylie said this resulted in wider consideration of measures in committee; gave the committee reports more weight on the Senate floor, saving time there; and made possible continuous work by all of the committees and full attention to committee work by each Senator. Previously committees had often been compelled to adjourn because of the absence of a quorum. The Nebraska Legislature has also proved able to reform itself in this particular. In 1915 the number of the Senate committees was reduced from forty-two, having 255 members, to twenty-eight, having 168 members; of House committees, from forty-seven, with 496 members, to thirty, with 248 members. The conflict of committee duties in point of time is of course more hurtful in upper branches, for they are the smaller bodies, thus requiring each Senator to cover much more ground than confronts a Representative. Mr. Underwood pointed out to the National Senate, June 13, 1918, the reasons why the business in the committees of the House was far more carefully and earnestly considered than the same legislation at the hands of the Senate committees. In the House almost universally a member had only one important committee assignment, and he had ample time to give his entire attention to the business before that committee. In the Senate, of necessity, with the size of the committees and their number, all had to be assigned to several more or less important committees. Repeatedly he had sat in a committee of the Senate having most important legislation before it, yet with only a simulated quorum of six or seven Senators hearing the witnesses and discussing the pending question for days, and then, when the final vote was to take place on the measure, in volving matters of great importance, Senators had appeared in the committee room to vote who had not heard the debate in committee, who had heard but little of the testimony, and who were voting on the request, suggestion, or information of some other Senator who was taking a partisan side of the question. In May of the following year the Republicans, coming into control, took a step toward meeting the situation by an agreement that no Senator should be chairman of more than one of the most important ten committees, nor a member of more than two of them. This was along the line of action taken by the Democrats in the House some years before when they had the majority, like action being taken by the Republicans when they succeeded to the control in 1919, with agreement that no Republican member of any one of ten specified committees should be assigned to any other standing committee. An interesting suggestion of another possible method of relief appeared in the California Assembly Daily Journal of January 12, 1917, in an announcement by the Speaker suggesting a tentative schedule of committee hearings. The proposal was that committees should be divided into groups, and no member be assigned to two places in the same group. This might work out usefully if certain days in the week should be assigned for the hearings of the committees in each group. The chance of conflict between duties is increased by the practice, wherever it may prevail, of referring matters to two committees sitting jointly. This practice seemed reprehensible to the Massachusetts Joint Special Committee of 1911 created to consider the practicability of shortening sessions. The reason advanced for urging the discontinuance of the practice was that it only redoubled the evils of having a large number of men attempt to wrestle with big problems, and of losing in joint work time that should be taken up by each committee with its own work. To my mind the interference with regular committee schedules and the resultant difficulty in getting a full attendance is a defect just as troublesome. Of course what should be the size of a committee is in some degree an arbitrary and conventional matter, and yet in the determination there are certain conditions that ought to be kept in mind. The committee has three functions first, the acquiring of information and opinion from outside; next, the forming and formulating of judgment from within; thirdly, the persuading of the House to adopt the conclusion reached. For the first and third of these, the committee can hardly be too large. The more numerous the members who have at first-hand heard the testimony and have listened to the arguments detailed with a length and thoroughness far more likely to be adequate than in the case of debate on the floor of the House, the more intelligent will be the judgment, with the less likelihood of its being affected by caprice or accident. The more numerous the members who have conceived a personal interest in the measure and who are imbued with the esprit de corps natural to committee membership, the more efficient will be the defense of the committee report. On the other hand, the forming and formulating of preliminary judgment call for a membership small enough to permit that desirable interplay of ideas which is found to be most effective when but a few men sit round a table. The common experience. of mankind is that boards, trustees, directors in brief, conferring groups of all sorts work to best advantage when they comprise from five to fifteen members. A larger number invites the formalities of oratory; may require some elevation of voice; brings the hampering influences of ceremony; discourages candor, frankness, bluntness; lessens the likelihood of attendance and punctuality; and weakens personal interest by diminishing personal sense of responsibility. The committees of the National Senate average to have about a dozen members each; of the House, about fifteen. In the House of Commons the most usual number of a select committee is fifteen. Experience on committees of fifteen and of eleven members in the Massachusetts Legislature has led me to the conclusion that on the whole the committee of eleven is somewhat more advantageous, but the arguments nearly balance. Nearly all the committees of the Massachusetts Convention of 1917 numbered fifteen, and their work was satisfactory. The Committee on Rules and Procedure, with nineteen members, proved a little too large. The committee system of that Convention was carefully planned to secure one most desirable result. Barring the members of the Committee on Rules and Procedure, no delegate was assigned to more than one committee, and every delegate had one assignment. The plan worked admirably. No man could excuse himself for neglecting committee work by the difficulty of being in two places at the same time. In three weeks the Con vention sat but once, leaving that period almost wholly free for committee work, and on resuming its sessions found that nearly all the committee reports were ready. This permitted the arrangement of an orderly program for debates, which was followed with reasonable accuracy. Of course it was impossible to apportion the work among the committees so that their burdens were equal, but the approach to equality was much closer than is found in a legislative session. The difficulties in this matter and the common lack of any attempt whatever to meet them have caused much of the prevalent criticism of the committee system, and indeed lie at the root of much of the inefficiency of our whole legislative system. Invariably some of the committees have far more to do than they can do well; some have far less to do than they could handle. Even so well-regulated a Legislature as that of Massachusetts has failed to solve this problem. In a recent session two committees were asked to consider less than twenty-five bills each; twelve, between twenty-five and fifty; eight, between fifty and a hundred: six, between one and two hundred: two, more than two hundred. In the Illinois General Assembly of 1917, of 1041 bills introduced in the House 183 went to the Committee on Appropriations and 277 to the Committee on Judiciary, these two committees thus getting numerically forty-four per cent of the work. In Congress the situation is in some aspects even worse. În one term out of more than seventy Senate committees (as the number then stood) and nearly sixty House committees, only thirty-one Senate and thirty-two House committees acted on bills that became law. It was the judgment of Asher C. Hinds that only sixteen of the House committees were really desirable, for they handle nearly all the legislation of the House.' Samuel W. McCall set a smaller number, saying that the chief work of the House is transacted in the first instance by fewer than a dozen committees, although at times half a dozen more may be prominent. Speaker Champ Clark reduced importance to still smaller dimensions, saying in the House, December 14, 1917: "In the popular estimation the four great committees in this House are Ways and Means, Judiciary, Appropriations, and Foreign Affairs. Actually the members of the House know that in addition to these two the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Com 1 "The Speaker and the House," McClure's, June, 1910. merce and the Post Office Committee are forcing themselves into that same class. These are the six committees that are always the greatest of our legislative committees. Occasionally some other committee becomes exceedingly prominent." On the face of it this state of affairs deserves the savage criticism of which it is from time to time the target. Certainly there is grave question of the expediency of a system under which two thirds of the members of the House have no part in its most important work. Yet nothing ever exists without something to be said for it, however weak the reasons advanced may seem in the eyes of the critic. In this instance a searcher for defense might find a peg on which to hang an argument, in the fact that inevitably the membership of any large assembly will vary greatly in respect of capacity and experience. Even distribution of talent among all the committees will result in each having a few strong men, with the rest of the membership made up of those less active, industrious, or gifted. Is this necessarily a better plan than to have the more important work concentrated in a few committees made up chiefly of those believed to surpass in aptitude for lawmaking? What may be called either the aristocratic system or the oligarchic will never lack for defenders, but it has palpable weaknesses of no small consequence. It invites to favoritism on the part of whoever selects. It proceeds on assumptions about relative merit that are often fallacious and always uncertain. It attaches undue weight to showy qualities, makes too little account of the undemonstrative virtues. It arouses jealousies and heartburnings. It brings a great element of chance into the congressional career, disappoints many capable men, deters others from running the risk of idle oblivion. Many who suffer from the system feel precisely what Representative Alvan T. Fuller of Massachusetts put into words when in February of 1918 he resigned his place on one of the ornamental committees and in his letter to the Speaker denounced the system. He did not wish by continuing his membership to appear to give even tacit consent to the existence of a useless committee. "Why," he asked, "could not some of these needless committees that never meet, and that are occupying valuable room and employing secretaries and messengers that have no work to do, be utilized for various useful purposes, such as inspecting camps, soliciting labor for shipyards, doing any one of the hundred and one things that the |