the abstention from federal interference in an interest which had outgrown the power of regulation by the individual States, had resulted in many oppressive abuses by the railway companies, which the enforcement of the Interstate Commerce Act is in process of removing. Hereafter, the fear of over-legislation will be less potent in deterring the imposition of restraints by Congress in all such cases as tend to grow to such magnitude and overshadowing proportions, that it may seriously be apprehended that a refusal to exercise control is likely to result in private wrongs and tyrannizing of citizens far greater than any evils to be looked for from the exercise of governmental authority. The passage of the law regulating interstate commerce, and the organization of a commission thereunder commanding public confidence, have been perhaps, in this day and generation, the most important administrative advance taken by the Government of the United States to obliterate State authority where State authority has proved impotent and ineffectual, and to protect the public from the dangers of encroachments on the rights of the individual by agencies which in power had outgrown State control.

To avoid too much interference with stereotyped

xviii PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION.

plates, addenda to the book following page 274 carry the history of the Constitution and the political development of the United States from 1882 down to the close of 1887, instead of interweaving them in the separate chapters.

NEW YORK, February 16, 1888.

ARTICLES IN ADDITION TO, AND AMENDMENT OF, THE CON-

JALIFORNIA

CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

OF THE

UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.

CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.

IT would far transcend the limits of a book intended for popular purposes, to enter into an elaborate investigation of all the causes which contributed to the creation of the United States Constitution, or to trace in detail the reasons why the constitutions of the American States all came to be written documents, instead of being unwritten and elastic principles of government, like the Constitution of Great Britain. Without much sacrifice of space, however, a few salient elements may properly here have attention drawn to them.

The powers of the governments of the English colonies in America, before the Revolutionary war, beginning in 1775, were all written instruc