A Big Task

The Illinois State Farmers' Allianoe resolved, among otiier things, "to petition for the passage of such alaw as will make it the duty of the supreme conrt to pass upon every new law and define ite meaning with such clearnessj as to make it plain to the average soholar." In this resolve the farmers strike at an evil of enormous magnitude, but they strike in a way to make the judges of the supreme court stand aghast. ilany of the ablest lawyers the country haa produced have expended all their ingenuity upon the attempt to correct the evil in some measure and reduce the coufused mass of legislation already existing to intelligible forms of expression, and to secure the intelligible formulation of new enactments. But none of them ever dreamed of imposing upon the supreme court of a state the responsibility and the herculean labor of putting all the state's laws into such form as to make not only their general purport but all their provisions "plain tí the average scholar." If the court were not overloaded with work falling within the limits of ita proper functions it would be extremely reluctant to undertake the task of finding out and expressing in words plain to the average scholar just what the lature intended to enact in every case. The farmer would do well to begin by petitioning the legislature for the passage of such a law as will make it its own duty to put its enactments in forms oi words which will clearly and unmistakably express its meaning and intention. The legislature cannot endow any court with the divine faculty of looking through the printed page down into the innermost recesses of the legislative mind, and reading there exactly what that mind intended to enact. Let the farmers petition the legislature to pass a law requiring itself to append to every one of its enactments an exegetical coinmentary and an analysis sufflciently extended and lucid to make its meaning plain, if not to the average scholar, at least to the average supreme court. We would remind the farmers oi the time honored saying that in purifying a turbid stream it is advisable te begin at the souroe. Let them send men to the legislatura who know how to express themselves in English that the average scholar can nnderstand, and how to frame together the different parte of a coinplicated law in such a way that a man of logical and retentive mind can teil what it all means. It is not the easiest thing in the world to find the men who are capable of doing this, and then to put them in just the right place af ter election to make them most useful to the public. But if both rural and urban constituencies will set themselves seriously and earnestly about the work of reform just at this point they will not only greatly lighten the labors of the supreme court, instead oí adding thereto, but they will save a vast amount of money now spent in HOU.-