jority of the electors voting thereon, shall become a part of this Constitution. When a convention is called, the members thereof shall be elected at the next general election thereafter, by Senate districts, sixteen from each district.

§ 107. This Constitution and the Constitution of the United States shall be taught in all the public schools of this State, and a copy of both shall be delivered to every scholar during his attendance.

PART IV.-REPEAL OF FORMER CONSTITU

TIONS.

§ 108. This Constitution shall take effect on the first day of January, 1869. The preceding Constitution shall continue in force till that day, except that

1. Members of the General Assembly, Governor and Lieutenant-Governor, under this Constitution, shall be elected at the general election in 1868.

2. Sections 60 to 83, both inclusive, of this Constitution, shall apply to the Legislature under the preceding Constitution, on and after the first day of January, 1868.

§ 109. All officers holding office on the thirty-first day of December, 1868, except the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, Senators, and members of Assembly, shall continue to hold their offices, and exercise the functions thereof, as they then exist, till the first day of March, 1869, and no longer.

§ 110. On the first day of March, 1869, all actions and proceedings then pending in the Court of Appeals and in the Supreme Court under the preceding Constitution, shall be transferred to the Supreme Court established under this Constitution.

§ 111. The former Constitutions of government of this State, with all their amendments, are repealed, such repeal to take effect on the first day of January, 1869, except as provided in the last two sections; but this repeal shall not revive any former law or rule heretofore repealed or abrogated, nor shall it affect any right already existing or accrued, or any proceeding already taken, except as in this Constitution provided.

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION.

Article by Mr. Field, published in "Putnam's Monthly," June, 1870.

WE call ours a popular, representative government, that is, a government of the people acting by their representatives. The theory of every law in any one of the States is expressed in the enacting clause of New York statutes, which is that "the people of the State of New York, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows." The purpose of the present essay is to show how far this is true, and, if not true, how it can be made so. It is no part of our plan to examine the reasons for regarding the theory of our institutions as the true one. That belongs properly to another discussion. We are not now to compare republican governments with those which are monarchical, nor the different kinds of either class. The fundamental principle of American polity is, that all government comes from the people, to be exercised by them, and for them. The motto supposed to be written here upon every symbol of authority is, "from the people, by the people, for the people." The conformity, or rather non-conformity, of our practice to our theory is the subject for present discussion. In pursuing it, we will, for illustration, begin with our own State, New York-that great Commonwealth which stamps the name of the supposed lawgiver upon the front of all its statutes.

Our Legislature is composed of a Senate and Assembly, the former consisting of thirty-two members, the latter of one hundred and twenty-eight. Each member of either House is chosen by the electors of a district, the limits of which may be changed every ten years, so as to make those of each class equal in population. Each district is single, and at each election the candidate having the largest number of votes is declared elected, though that number may not be a majority of all the votes belonging to the district, or even of the votes cast. If, for example, there be three candidates, two of whom receive each one third of the votes, less one, the third candidate will be chosen,

though he has received only one third of the votes, with two added. The Senate is chosen every two years, the Assembly every year. In 1868 eight hundred and eighty-one statutes were passed; in 1869 nine hundred and twenty. We now begin to perceive how truly, or rather untruly, speaks the enacting clause of each of these eighteen hundred and one statutes. Apart from the fact that the Senate chosen in the autumn of 1867 for the next two years may not be the Senate which the people would have chosen in the autumn of 1868, we see that each election may have resulted in giving the representation to a majority or plurality in each district, leaving all the rest of the voters unrepresented. Thus it may happen, and does in fact often happen, that, inasmuch as a bill may be passed by a majority of the members elected to each House, seventeen Senators and sixty-five members of Assembly may enact a law, and these eighty-two men may, in fact, hold their seats by the votes of a minority of the electors of the State. If the enacting clause were, then, to speak truly, it would run in this wise: "One third (or one fourth, or one fifth, as the case may be) of the people of the State of New York, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows."

This comes of perverting what should be a personal selection into one that is local or territorial, and makes a Legislature almost as likely to misrepresent as to represent the will of the people. Let us see how the system works.

We will look at the State governments first, and the Federal Government afterward. In doing so, we will take for the most part the election of 1868, the time of the last Presidential election, and therefore most likely to bring out a full vote. In the Senate of New York seventeen Republican Senators had been elected the year before by 324,687 votes, and fifteen Democratic Senators by 353,136 votes. In the Assembly seventy-six Republican members were elected in 1868 by 397,899 votes, while only fifty-two Democratic members were elected by 431,510 votes. There were thus 28,449 more votes cast for the fifteen Democrats in the Senate than were cast for the seventeen Republicans, and, if the representation had been faithful to the principle, there would have been seventeen Democrats and fifteen Republicans, and the majority of two for the lat

ter would have been reversed and made two for the former. There were at the next year's election 33,611 more votes cast for the fifty-two Democratic members of Assembly than for the seventy-six Republican members. If the representation here had been proportional to the votes, the number of Democrats elected would have been sixty-seven instead of fifty-two, the number of Republicans sixty-one instead of seventy-six; and the majority, instead of being twenty-four for the Republicans, would have been six for the Democrats.

Turning to other States we find the following results: in Maryland the Democrats cast 62,357 votes, and elected every member of both Houses, 111 in number; while the Republicans polled 30,438 votes, and elected nobody. In Delaware the Republicans elected only two members by 7,623 votes, while the Democrats elected twenty-eight by 10,980. In Kansas the Republicans elected one hundred and eight members by 31,046 votes, while the Democrats elected only seven by 14,019 votes. In Nevada the Republicans cast 6,480 votes, and elected fifty-one members; the Democrats cast 5,218, and elected only six members. In California the Republicans elected twenty-three members by 54,592 votes, while the Democrats elected ninety-seven members by a less number, that is, by 54,078. In Vermont two hundred and forty Republicans were elected by 44,167 votes, and twenty-six Democrats by 12,045. In Maine 70,426 Republicans elected two hundred and forty-three members, and 42,396 Democrats only thirty-seven. Maryland's Republicans thus cast nearly a third of all the votes in the State, without getting a single representative in either branch of the Legislature. In Delaware the Republicans gave over forty per cent. of the popular vote, and gained but six per cent. of the Legislature, while in California they gave an actual majority, but gained less than one fifth. On the other hand, the Democrats in Kansas gave a third of the votes, and obtained but six per cent. of the Legislature; in Vermont they cast twenty-one per cent. of the vote, and obtained but nine per cent. of the Legislature; in Maine they cast thirty-seven per cent. of the vote, and obtained only thirteen per cent. of the Legislature; in Nevada, with nearly half the vote, they had but ten per cent. of the Legislature.

Passing now to the Federal Government, we find that the representation in the House of Representatives for the State of New York consists of seventeen Republicans and fourteen Democrats, though the former received but 416,492 votes, while the latter received 423,365; that is to say, the popular majority was 7,073 for the Democrats, while the Congressional majority in the delegation is three on the side of the Republicans instead of being, as it should have been, one on the side of the Democrats. Taking the whole House of Representatives without the unrepresented States, we find one hundred and forty-eight Republicans and seventy-one Democratic members; the former having received 2,654,048 votes and the latter 2,037,178; that is to say, the Republicans on fifty-six per cent. of the popular vote have sixty-seven per cent. of the Congressional vote; and the Democrats on fortythree per cent. of the former have thirty-two per cent. of the latter.

In the Senate the representation is still further removed from the people, as the following statement will show :

There are thirty-seven States entitled to seventy-four Sen

ators.

This table gives the vote of the eighteen States having the largest population and entitled to be represented in the Senate by thirty-six Senators:

New York, 849,750; Pennsylvania, 655,662; Ohio, 518,828; Illinois, 449,436; Indiana, 343,532; Michigan, 225,619; Virginia, 220,739; Massachusetts, 195,911; Iowa, 194,439; Wisconsin, 193,584; North Carolina, 176,324; New Jersey, 162,645; Georgia, 158,926; Kentucky, 155,455; Alabama, 147,781; Missouri, 147,135; Mississippi, 114,283; Maine, 112,822. Total vote, 5,022,871.

The following table shows the vote of the nineteen States having the smallest population and entitled to be represented in the Senate by thirty-eight Senators:

California, 108,660; South Carolina, 108,135; Texas, 107,780; Connecticut, 98,947; Maryland, 92,795; Tennessee, 82,757; Minnesota, 71,620; Louisiana, 71,100; New Hampshire, 69,415; Vermont, 56,224; West Virginia, 49,397; Kansas, 43,648; Arkansas, 42,148; Oregon, 22,085; Florida, 22,022;