2lS DAVIS 



tain. It is the constitution of the District, and its grants of 

 power are to be taken as new and independent grants, and ex- 

 pressing in themselves both their extent and limitations. Such 

 was the view taken by the court below : and such we believe is 

 the true view to be taken of the statute. 



The last act in what may be termed the unification of the 

 District was the passage by Congress of the law of February 

 II, 1895 (28 Stats. 650), abolishing the city of Georgetown 

 and its name, repealing all of its general laws, regulations and 

 ordinances, and extending to it all general laws, regulations 

 and ordinances of the city of Washington. And by an agency 

 more effective than the most solemn statute, namely, the usage 

 of the people, the further result has been accomplished that to 

 all practical intents and purposes, and in the eyes of the nation 

 at large, the entire District now passes by the name of the 

 Father of our Country, originally given to our city, but which, 

 like the illustrious character from whom it was taken, has drawn 

 to itself its whole environment. 



And the political development of the District of Columbia 

 suggests to me the plan of this beautiful city of ours, not built 

 upon an uninviting plain and not laid out in exclusively right 

 lines, but set in an environment of rare attractiveness ; with 

 its system of wide streets overlaid by intersecting avenues 

 which break the otherwise mathematical stiffness of its thor- 

 oughfares, and set with beautifying and refreshing parks un- 

 rivaled by any intra-urban park system of the world. So 

 with our political growth and development : begmning with 

 the simple institution of the Lev}'^ Court, taking up as occasion 

 required the forms of municipal government felt to be adapted 

 to the situation from time to time, and finally taking the form of 

 a wisely-conceived and skillfully-constructed scheme of local 

 government, and yet all the while under the play of the essen- 

 tially American distinction between the National and local 

 systems. While on every hand we find statutory provisions, 

 with their artificiality of conception and rigidness of expression, 

 we yet meet at every point the freer action of those natural and 

 more elastic elements of usage, tradition and fundamental prin- 

 ciple which are at the bottom of all things English and out of 

 which only all true law and political development spring and 



