hubert howe bancroft - Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History ...

GLARING DEFBOT& 371
With regard to salaries, no limit was imposed upon
the legislature, which might allow its members and
officers any amount. No guard had been established
against extravagant fees, which the laws, in consequence,
allowed for the most ordinary official services.
The legislature was not restrained from disposing of the
entire public domain and property of the state, without
obtaining the consent of the people; nor did the
constitution prohibit that body from funding or from
otherwise forcing the people to pay illegal demands
against the state, or its lesser communities. It made
no provision for separate senatorial and assembly districts,
whereby the people might be specifically represented.
The members elected at large from the
more populous counties controlled the legislature,
while there was no exclusive responsibility resting
upon them. The number of assembly-men was limited
to eighty and of senators to forty. The assembly
had already its full complement, though counties existed
which had no representation in the house.
Another serious fault was the unrestricted pardoning
power of the governor, which should never form
any appreciable link in proceedings in criminal punishment.
To sum up in one all the counts against
the constitution, as experience revealed its defects,
the case was this: that the whole political duty and
power of the people under it was to vote into place
the men who would legislate away their substance—
the constitution gave them no remedy.
The complainants asserted that the state required
a constitution peculiarly her own, suited to its geography,
topography, resources, commercial requirements,
and the character of its population, and not to
the wants of the purely agricultural states after which
the constitution of 1849 was copied.
Undoubtedly there was some truth in all this,
although much exaggerated. At the bottom of the
discontent was a cause more pregnant than the incongruity
of the constitution with the natural, cominer-