244 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



instead of Springfield, St. Louis instead of Jefferson City, and so on? Is it 

 likely that a court sitting in New York City would have gone wrong in construing 

 tenement-house legislation? Questions may well seem abstract and academic in 

 Albany or Springfield that are concrete and practical in New York or Chicago. 

 Judges there may well fail to appreciate the practical aspects of legislation 

 which a court sitting in the metropolis, whose judges met and talked with social 

 workers in the ordinary intercourse of society, would perceive. Our rural capitals 

 are not a little to be blamed if the course of justice in our highest court with re- 

 spect to urban problems has been guided largely by judges who looked at them 

 through rural spectacles.is 



Finally, the difficulty of amending the constitution of certain states, 

 and especially the federal constitution, is bringing the judiciary into 

 disfavor. When the nation consisted of a homogeneous population con- 

 fined to the Atlantic states, the amendment of the constitution offered 

 no insuperable difficulty. The framers of the constitution could not 

 have intended to provide the country with an inflexible instrument, for 

 "they were trying to escape from the restraints of a still more rigid 

 constitution." 16 None the less, with the growth of slavery, the admission 

 of new states, the development of manufacturing, mining and commerce, 

 and the consequent emergence of sectional differences, the difficulty of 

 amendment has increased until vetoes interposed by the courts have 

 become less and less suspensory and more and more absolute in charac- 

 ter. Nearly eighteen years were required to restore to Congress the 

 power to levy an income tax, though it was generally supposed that 

 Congress possessed this power until the adverse decision of the Supreme 

 Court in 1895. As a matter of fact, Congress imposed an income tax 

 in 1861 and the Supreme Court held it constitutional. 17 For more than 

 two generations there was an increasing demand for the election of 

 United States senators by popular vote, but so difficult did formally 

 amending the constitution prove in this case that years before it was 

 accomplished election by the legislature became a mere form and was 

 superseded by direct primaries in many states. No other important 

 country is operating under such a rigid constitution. Amendment by 

 interpretation is occasionally practised by the courts, but too infre- 

 quently to afford an adequate remedy. Besides, as with religious creeds, 

 forced construction sometimes makes a laughing-stock both of the con- 

 stitution and the courts. The result is that the American people are 

 barred from passing measures which many other countries deem neces- 

 sary to their well-being. Among such measures are " pensions or public 

 insurance in case of old age, accident or sickness where the recipient of 

 the pension or insurance is not actually a pauper and where the fund 

 from which such pension or insurance is obtained is derived from taxa- 

 tion; the regulation of the hours of adult male labor in any but the 



is Op. cit., pp. 325-326. 



is Professor Monroe Smith, North American Beview, Vol. 194, 1911, p. 658. 



17 Israel Ward Andrews, "Manual of the Constitution," revised in 1892, p. 83. 



