Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/351

331 MASSACHUSETTS AS A PHILANTHROPIC ROBBER. 33 1 public grab-bag and pull something out of the State. The legisla- tor from sympathy, or from a desire to get votes, or from an inability to say " No," introduces a resolve calling for robbery of the public treasury in favor of his constituent. The resolve is referred to some appropriate committee, the committee on military affairs, or the committee on agriculture, or on public institutions, or on prisons, as the case may be. The petitioner for damages appears either personally or by counsel. A brief hearing is held. He is questioned by members of the committee; in rare cases one or two witnesses are heard. No counsel represents the State. There is no rigid cross-examination. The legislator who introduced the resolve makes an affecting appeal in behalf of the injured man. Some other friendly senator or representative, who knows little about the claim, is persuaded by the legislator to speak in favor of his pet resolve. The committee reports generally in favor of the robbery. It goes to the House, and, like all bills or resolves involving expenditure of money, is sent to the committee on ways and means. This committee, overwhelmed with work, gives a very casual consideration of the resolve, or in the case of those involving any large expenditures of moneys, listens to one or two witnesses, and reports it to the House. Meanwhile the legislator who intro- duced the resolve sees various members, logrolls, and impresses the House and Senate generally with the hardship of the case; and the House and the Senate pass it in a burst of sympathy and philanthropy, with little consideration of the legal standing of the claim, or of the rights of the taxpayers of the State to be protected against unconstitutional expenditure of the State's money. Such being the method of procedure, can any one believe that these resolves are a proper means of imposing a liability to pay money upon the State? None of the procedures of a court are used. The real responsibility for the injury, the real amount of damage caused, the real standard of compensation, cannot be ascertained by a committee. There is no provision for cross-examination, no representation of the State's side of the case, no certainty that all of the facts of the case are before the tribunal. If the State should be liable for these injuries, that liability should be tested in court through the ordinary procedure of law like any other legal liability. The illustration given above is the best proof of the injustice and illegality of those resolves. In the Murdock Grate Co. case the company had sued in court, and the Supreme Court had held, 43