Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/65

Rh in the enjoyment of pensions, tithes, monopolies, vested rights, exclusive privileges until, with blunted sensibilities and beclouded intellects, they delude themselves into acquiescence in, and support of, such inequalities and wrongs. So in the United States, under powers granted in the Constitution, such as levying duties and taxes, regulating commerce, war, appropriating money, disposing of territory and other property, admitting new States, the government during the Confederate war incorporated banks, made fiat money or promises to pay a legal tender, constructed roads, granted bounties and monopolies, gave away the property of the people, prescribed State constitutions, emancipated slaves, fixed terms and conditions of suffrage, dictated manner of appointing and electing senators, assumed control over railways and industries and absorbed and exercised a sovereign power over interstate commerce, capital, labor, currency and property. We have seen an alliance be tween Congress and eleemosynarians, senators taking care of their private affairs in revenue bills, and manufacturers before sub-committees of ways and means and of finance dictating the subjects to be taxed and the amount of duties to be levied.

One wonders how these revolutions and iniquities have been accomplished. Governor Morris wrote to Timothy Pickering that "the legislative lion will not be entangled in the meshes of a logical net. The legislature will always make the power which it wishes to exercise.&quot; One of the ablest expounders of the Constitution deplores &quot;the science of verbality, &quot; the artifice of so verbalizing as to assail and destroy the plainest provisions. The instrumentality of inference has sapped and mined our political system. Acuteness of misinterpretation and construction has accomplished what the framers of the Constitution exerted all their faculties, by specifications and restrictions, to prevent, so that constructive powers have been as seed-bearing of mischief and usurpation as the