not discretionary. Such an attitude has been carefully fostered and built up over a long period of years in the office of the British Parliamentary Counsel to the Treasury, and it would seem that we are approximating it in the United States. Of all the elaborate plans for expanding legislative reference service which have been enthusiastically set forth from time to time, practically none has been brought to fruition. Senator Owen's scheme for building up a very extensive legislative reference service for the national government, to be connected with a graduate school of government and legislation, seems to be farther from fulfillment than when it was first broached. Nor does it seem likely that any state will in the near future attempt the plan suggested by John A. Lapp-a variation upon that first set forth by John Stuart Mill in his Representative Government -namely, the entire withdrawal of the law-drafting function from the legislature, leaving that body only the alternative of accepting or rejecting bills drawn by a commission of experts. Even the much less drastic proposal of submitting all bills to the legislative reference bureau for technical revision and suggestion has been accepted only in very few American states, notably Connecticut and Vermont. The inception and early development of the legislative reference bureau belong to the first decade of the twentieth century -a time of progressivism and hopeful experimentation in matters governmental. At present we are going through a period of disillusionment and conservatism, and proposed experiments are viewed with disfavor. Probably in a few years, when the wheel has turned full circle, we will have another era of experimentation, and we may then have an opportunity to test these larger plans. Meanwhile, the legislative reference bureau is carrying out its routine work of library reference and bill-drafting, and there are few who advocate its discontinuance. 139. PROBLEMS OF LEGISLATIVE ORGANIZATION The following article contains a survey of the problems, both practical and fundamental, of the organization and work of the legislature. It was prepared for the use of the Illinois Constitutional Convention of 1920-1922, and has special reference to conditions in that state. For the most part, however, it applies equally well to the states generally. [Illinois Constitutional Convention Bulletins, 1920, pp. 588-597.] A state legislature is essentially the affirmative organ of the state government for the development of new policies, or for the establishment of new principles. The executive has little or no authority to establish new policies, and the courts have less power to do so. The legislature, as the organ of the state government for affirmative action, should of course be so organized that it may operate effectively for this purpose. During certain periods in the development of English law, legislative action was perhaps the most decisive influence in the development of the principles of private law. However, on the whole, the English legal system has in its main lines developed as a result of judicial action, and the legislature has normally limited itself to the meeting of new problems which could not be satisfactorily handled by the courts, or to the problem of restating in statutory form the results of judicial action. Occasionally important acts, such as the negotiable instruments act, the uniform sales act, and the uniform partnership act, are enacted by the General Assembly summing up and seeking to codify the existing law, with such changes as may seem desirable. Such an effort at legislative restatement of the whole law upon a particular subject is not frequent; and within the field of private law a session of the Illinois General Assembly ordinarily deals with only a small number of problems in which some specific difficulty may have presented itself. The work of the Illinois General Assembly may, therefore, be said not to relate primarily to the development of rules for the regulation of relations between private individuals. Sir Courtney Ilbert remarked some time ago of the English Parliament that not one-tenth of the work of a session related to matters of private rights, and that the remainder related to matters primarily administrative in character. The same statement may be made regarding the work of the Illinois General Assembly. The great mass of its work relates to matters other than those which have to do with the relations between private individuals. Of course, the appropriations for the support of the state govern*ment and legislation regarding the administrative functions of the state and of the local subdivisions of the state are equally as important to the citizen as is legislation regulating the private rights of one citizen as against another. However, legislation which is primarily administrative in character involves problems of a distinctly different sort from that with respect to matters of private right. An analysis of the legislative work of the General Assembly of Illinois in 1917 and 1919 indicates that of the 338 laws enacted by the General Assembly at its regular session in 1917, only seventeen can be classed as regulating primarily the private rights of parties among themselves. Of the 429 laws enacted at the regular session of the Illinois General Assembly in 1919 only fourteen belong to this class. A table is given below indicating in a rough fashion the types of matters dealt with by legislation in Illinois at these two sessions: State appropriations .... ... Laws relating to state administrative matters....... Acts containing new substantive matter of legislation and merely containing appropriations incident thereto are not classified as appropriation acts. It is difficult to make a distinction between state and local administrative matters, and doubts have been resolved in favor of classification as local matters. The numerous acts readjusting local tax rates in 1919 are responsible for the large proportion of laws for that year classified as relating to local administrative matters. This table probably indicates with sufficient clearness that the problems of legislation are primarily problems connected with the operation of state and local governments, and not problems having to do primarily with the rights of private individuals among themselves. In the case of state appropriations and of substantially all legislation regarding state administration, the information upon which legislation is to be based must be obtained primarily from the existing executive governmental agencies of the state, and with a better organization of the executive government the information for such legislation will be much more easily available than at the present time. For matters relating to local administration, information again must to a great extent come from the state executive offices which have a general supervision over the different functions of local government. For example, with respect to schools and with respect to local charitable administration, a good deal of the impulse for legislation may come from the local communities, but this centers largely upon the state executive offices having supervision over these matters. Comment is made later in this discussion upon the fact that there is no constitutionally recognized relationship between the General Assembly and the executive department with respect to the enactment of legislation, although perhaps fully nine-tenths of the work of the General Assembly at each of its sessions must be devoted to legislation or proposed legislation having to do with the administration of gov ernment. The chief problems of legislation coming before the General Assembly are problems of a technical character, requiring information regarding the actual operation of government and regarding the operation of similar institutions elsewhere. Legislation is a technical expert task and in the states of this country it is performed by a body, the length of whose session is in most cases narrowly limited. In Illinois where there is no constitutional limit, the General Assembly meets for five or six months in each two years, and the members during that five or six months' period return home ordinarily at the end of each week. The executive veto operates as a purely negative check, and even as a negative check is exercised in the main in such manner that defects in proposed legislation detected by the governor cannot be corrected by the General Assembly. As has already been suggested, substantially all the bills come to the governor at the end of the session, and his action upon these bills is reported to the legislative bodies which have met merely in a formal manner and ordinarily without a quorum. The whole development in the states of this country has been that of throwing limitations around the performance of legislative function, and of reducing the periods within which the legislature may act. Attention has already been called to the fact that annual sessions of legislatures have almost ceased in this country and also to the fact that legislative sessions are in most states limited to a fairly brief period. No limitations upon the legislative session exist in Illinois, and normally the General Assembly sits from January until close to the first of July, taking a recess a sufficient time before that date for the governor to act upon bills, and for laws to come into effect on the first of July, as now required by the constitution. Legislative bodies have not only been restricted in the frequency and length of their sessions, but their power has also been limited in this and other states by the development of the executive veto. The function of legislation is the affirmative task of laying down new policies and the executive veto has come to be primarily a negative check. Detailed limitations as to its procedure and as to the things which it may do have been placed around the legislature in such a manner that pitfalls exist in substantially every direction. Even the most carefully drafted legislation may have overlooked some one of the pitfalls which has been planned by the constitution, und even if such pitfalls have all been carefully avoided there is great danger of violating some constitutional provision as to procedure in the numerous steps of its cumbersome legislative process through which every bill must pass before it becomes law. Legislation has therefore become a hazardous occupation. Distrust of legislatures developed very early after the independence of this country, and that distrust has led to a hampering of the legislative function in so many respects that effective and valid legislation has become an extremely difficult thing. Little has been done as yet in this country toward the working out of plans by which the General Assembly may be made a responsible legislative body for the affirmative enactment of state policies. Substantially all the development has been toward limiting and restricting the General Assembly's power for evil, upon the apparent assumption that a legislative body is merely a necessary evil. Naturally little has been accomplished under this theory in the bettering of legislative organization. The legislative body under the constitution of Illinois is and can be in no sense a body of lawmaking experts. Members of the General Assembly are elected from all walks of life for the purpose of giving ordinarily not over six months out of each two years of their time to the business of legislation. They may well represent under the plans now in existence the sentiment of the community with respect to broad matters of public policy, but such broad matters are rather infrequent as compared with the more detailed and more technical matters which must be delt with by legislation. The principle of the separation of powers is formally embodied in the constitution of Illinois, but is expressly subject to all of the exceptions made in the text of the constitution itself. This principle was announced in the constitution of 1818, but the constitution of that year did little toward establishing the principle in practice. From 1818 to 1848, the legislative department was predominant and largely controlled the executive and judicial departments. Such a predominance of the legislative department characterized all state governments after the declaration of independence, and independent spheres of executive and judicial departments gradually became established in the fifty years following 1776. The increased power of the executive and judicial departments has come about primarily through the vesting in these departments of power at first regarded as legislative. In a discussion earlier in this pamphlet upon the relations of the General Assembly with other departments of the state gov |