JURISPRUDENCE AND LEGISLATION 629 



ruption to inefficiency and carelessness, and led to the manifold 

 restraints on legislative powers and methods which are character- 

 istic of the constitutions and constitutional amendments of the second 

 half of the nineteenth century. The various improvements in meth- 

 ods of legislation had for their object to advise legislators of the pur- 

 pose and content of measures, and to make more difficult the adoption 

 of bills without any consideration in the closing days of the sessions; 

 none sought to secure responsibility for initiation, notice, and hearing 

 to the interests affected (except, in some states, in case of local 

 legislation) or the requisite legal skill in the drafting of acts; for 

 the defects concerning these points did not sufficiently impress the 

 public mind, and the legal profession did not seem to feel that its 

 interests required their removal. 



Nearly every one of our constitutional provisions owes its existence 

 to concrete and definite experiences of either the American or the 

 English people in the matter of government. It is well known that 

 the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to deal with the specific 

 problem of the protection of the Negro. When the due process 

 clauses in the earlier constitutions were formulated, the interference 

 of the police power with economic interests had not aroused any 

 noticeable discussion or protest. Historically it is indisputable that 

 these fundamental clauses were not designed to impose upon the 

 American system of government hard and fast doctrines of economic 

 liberty as principles of constitutional law. 



But when with the increasing complexity of the social and indus- 

 trial structure of the state the functions of government began to 

 expand, when a demand arose for the satisfaction of novel concep- 

 tions of public welfare, and the interests of the economically weaker 

 classes came to be identified with the public interest, it was inevit- 

 able that those who were prejudicially affected by this extension 

 of state power should refuse to regard the frequently crude enact- 

 ments of a discredited legislative department as final and conclusive. 

 The traditional judicial attitude toward legislation, coupled with 

 the firmly established power of controlling the validity of statutes, 

 made it equally inevitable that the courts should entertain appeals 

 to this power, and that they should seize upon the fundamental 

 guaranties of the constitution as forbidding legislation which injured 

 valuable interests without an}^ assurance of careful consideration, 

 where such legislation seemed to them needless or oppressive or 

 contrary to earlier American conceptions of the sphere of govern- 

 ment. Hence, the long array of decisions which within the last 

 generation has thrown the law of the police power into confusion and 

 uncertainty. 



There are a number of undeniable objections to this method of 

 correcting evils of legislation by judicial action: In the first place, 



