Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
Personal privilege, depending not upon race, but upon legislation, or
inheritance, is, of course, strictly forbidden in each State by both
constitutions, State and Federal. The growth of a contrary principle
is only noteworthy on the two lines touching respectively the whites
in the South and veterans of wars in the North. It must be said that
legislation in the interest of the Grand Army of the Republic, and
even of the veterans of the Spanish War, and even in some States of
the sons or descendants of such veterans respectively, has come very
near the point of hereditary or social privilege. The struggles of
so-called "Organized Labor" to establish a privileged caste have so
far been generally unsuccessful, always so in the courts, and usually
so in the legislatures; but in many States those who have enlisted in
either wars, Civil or Spanish, wholly irrespective of actual service
or injury, are entitled not only to pensions, Federal and State, but
to a diversity of forms of State aid, to general preference in public
employment, and even to special privilege or exemption from license
taxes, etc., in private trades, and their children or descendants are,
in many States, entitled to special educational privilege, to support
in State schools or industrial colleges, to free text-books, and other
advantages. Presumably some of these matters might be successfully
contested in the courts, but they never have been. As to pensions,
nothing here need be said. The reader will remember the familiar fact
that our pensions in time of peace now cost more than the maintenance
of the entire German army on a war footing or than the maintenance of
our own army. The last pensioner of the Revolutionary War, which
ended in 1781--that is to say, the last widow of a Revolutionary
soldier--only died a few years ago, early in the twentieth century.
The Order of the Cincinnati, founded by Washington and Lafayette, was
nevertheless a subject of jealous anxiety to our forefathers; but
apparently the successful attempt of volunteers disbanded after
the Civil and the Spanish Wars, although far more menacing because
embodying social and political privilege, not a mere badge of honor,
seems to call forth but little criticism.
XVII
SEX LEGISLATION, MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
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