Equally significant was the failure of the Convention to make any adequate provision for enforcing publicity. The Constitution says "a regular statement of the receipts and expenditures of public money shall be published from time to time," and also that "each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, except such parts as may in their judgment required secrecy."[124] That these provisions were of little practical value is evident from the fact that they contain no definite statement as to when and how often the accounts and journals are to be published. The phrase _from time to time_ was susceptible of almost any interpretation that either house of Congress or the President might wish to give it, and could easily have been so construed as to justify a method of publication which gave the people but little information concerning the present state of public affairs. The framers of the Constitution did not believe that the management of the government was in any proper sense the people's business; yet they realized that the people themselves took a different view of the matter, which made some constitutional guarantee of publicity necessary. It was, however, the form rather than the substance of such a guarantee which the Constitution contained. Neither house of Congress is required by the Constitution to hold open sittings or publish its speeches and debates.[125] Until 1799 the Senate exercised its constitutional right to transact public business in secret; and during that period preserved no record of its debates. This policy did not win for it the confidence of the people, and until after it was in a measure abandoned, the Senate, notwithstanding the important powers conferred on it by the Constitution, was not a very influential body. To deny the right of the people to control the government leads naturally to denial of their right to criticise those who shape its policy; since if free and unrestricted discussion and even condemnation of official conduct were allowed, no system of minority rule could long survive. This was well understood in the Federal Convention. The members of that body saw that the constitutional right of public officials to disregard the wishes of the people was incompatible with the right of the latter to drag them before the bar of public opinion. Hence some limitation of the right to criticise public officials was necessary to safeguard and preserve their official independence. This seems to have been the purpose of the Constitution in providing with reference to members of Congress that "for any speech or debate in either House they shall not be questioned in any other place."[126]