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that our Alabama claims were too large to be settled in money and intimated that a cession of Canada might be accepted as a satisfactory adjustment. The reply was that England did not wish to keep Canada, but could not part with it without the consent of its population.*

The original area of the United States, before the Louisiana purchase, was, perhaps, a million of square miles. That acquisition and the subsequent cession of the Floridas much more than doubled our territory. Texas then came to us with 300,000 square miles, and Mexico, in 1848 and 1853, ceded a somewhat greater number. In Alaska, we received, in 1867, an addition of over half a million, and thus our total area now is a little more than 3,500,000 square miles.

Canada and Newfoundland cover about the same extent of territory, or over 3,524,000 square miles, estimating for part of British Columbia not yet accurately surveyed.

At the time of the Revolution the latest authority on American geography was the American Gazetteer, published in London, in 1776. It gave the total area of the North American Continent, with a precision not aimed at by modern statisticians, at 3,699,087 square miles. The founders of the United States did not dream that the narrow line of States they had drawn together could in a century come to include a territory of 3,500,000 square miles, and still have beyond them another area of equal magnitude, and much of it of equal fertility and natural resources, into which to expand in the next century. But that expansion, I believe, it is our destiny to accomplish, and by no other means than those of peace and mutual good will. The good faith of the nation was pledged by the ClaytonBulwer treaty against further extension to the southward, though it is doubtful whether this is still binding upon us; ‡ but the North American Continent with every island on the east, and the Hawaiian group upon the west, all bound to it as satellites to their planet, will, if we continue in our historic policy as to annexation, eventually come under the flag of the United States.

It has been argued with great force by an eminent authority

* Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, IV, 409.

+ This is the estimate given in Morse's American Geography, published in 1792.

See Report of Senate Committee on Foreign Relations of December 22, 1892, on Senate bill No. 1218.

on American constitutional law,* that our plan of government makes no provision for a colonial system. But the relations of an extra-territorial possession to the United States can never be those of a colony to a European power. Such a colony has generally been treated as an appanage held for the benefit of the commercial interests of the mother country. Its trade, conducted by others and for others, has brought little benefit to its own inhabitants, to whom the navigation laws imposed upon them by a distant power have often seemed a kind of spoliation under the name of protection.

But any possessions, separated from the continent, which the United States may acquire, can rely on being governed under some system devised for the interest of all concerned, and administered by their own inhabitants, so far as they may show a capacity for self-government.

Nor yet need we fear that the United States would not, if the occasion demanded, rule with a strong hand, when we recal the almost despotic system of administration which, under the administration of Jefferson, was forced upon the unwilling inhabitants of the Louisiana and Orleans territories, and maintained until they had learned the real qualities and conditions of American citizenship.

Up to the present time the cost of such of our territory as has come to us by purchase has been, in all, as follows:

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It has been cheaply bought, even if we add to these sums the expenditures in the Seminole war, which followed the Florida purchase, and of the Mexican war, which had so close a connection with those which came next.

The greatest lawsuit in the world is now on trial at Paris, brought to define our rights as owner of the remotest of these acquisitions, a little island in the Pacific, farther than is Hawaii from San Francisco. It is a pleasant sign of the times that this controversy arises mainly from a humane sentiment towards the brute creation, and is to be decided precisely as any question between good neighbors might be, by a friendly arbitrament.

#

Judge Cooley in the Forum for June, 1893, Vol. xv, p. 393.

XXV.-THE ORIGIN OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE SYSTEM

IN AMERICAN LEGISLATIVE BODIES.

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By PROFESSOR J. FRANKLIN JAMESON,

OF BROWN UNIVERSITY.

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THE ORIGIN OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE SYSTEM IN AMER

ICAN LEGISLATIVE BODIES.

BY J. FRANKLIN JAMESON.

Mr. Bryce and Mr. Woodrow Wilson have familiarized us all with the notion that the transaction of business through standing committees is one of the leading peculiarities of American legislative bodies, as compared with the English legislature, and indeed perhaps the most important of such peculiarities. Congressional government is mainly government by standing committees and their rôle in State legislatures is equally important. It is therefore somewhat remarkable that, so far as the writer knows, no thorough historical examination has ever been made into the origin of the system. This is, to be sure, of a piece with our usual neglect of the history of all portions of our constitution except such as have found place and mention in the document called the Constitution of the United States. Our system of standing committees is one of the most important elements in our form of government; yet we have been content to examine its development in the Federal Senate and House of Representatives alone, and to assume that its history begins with the year 1789, and with the United States. That the first Congresses had very few standing committees, and that the transaction of nearly all legislative business through them can hardly be said to have become the regular practice of the House until the time of Speaker Clay is familiar. It is the object of the present paper to show that the institution existed long before this, in England and the American colonies, and to trace its development from the sixteenth century to the time of the American Revolution. No doubt two reasons why this has not been done before are, first, that the system has no place in the procedure of the House of Commons, and has virtually had none for nearly two centuries; and second, that it is not found in the colonial legislatures of New England, the region in which historical writers upon the colonial period have been most numerous.

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