Mr. McKIRDY. Well, but don't overlook this very important point; it is not a estion of the substance of that bill. That can be gathered by some of the clerks at would make a brief for him. But it is putting that one particular idea into such m that it will stand the decisions of the courts in construing it. It is not the getting this information. The draftsman knows nothing about immigration. Mr. GARDNER. I was talking purely about the decisions of the courts. Mr. McKIRDY. Yes; but a brief will furnish him all that information. Mr. GARDNER. Very imperfectly.

Mr. PICKETT. I think perhaps there is this distinction between the work at Harrisrg and in Congress. I am not, of course, familiar with the history of Pennsylvania a the respect you are speaking of. But ordinarily in our State members of the legisfuture do not serve many terms. In other words, their length of service does not ompare with the length of service here.

Mr. McKIRDY. That is true.

Mr. PICKETT. Now, then, along the line that you are suggesting, take the Comittee on the Public Lands. I believe Mr. Mondell knows more about the publicand laws of this country, the decisions, and the construction that has been placed apon various acts, than anybody else in the United States.

Mr. GARDNER. You can not get at it all by a mere brief. Every brief leaves out mething material.

Mr. PICKETT. Very true. It would almost require one man to give his entire time study of the public-land laws to be perfectly familiar with them.

Mr. Mc KIRBY. Well, gentlemen, allow me to say that, admitting all that to be absoluely true, still that gentleman, Mr. Mondell, perhaps can not draw a bill that would in clear language express just exactly the idea that is in his mind when he draws it; he should seek the advice of a man who is skilled in applying language and the rules of statutory construction to lawmaking.

Mr. NELSON. Might I interrupt to bring out this thought: With this expert on the echnical form, an expert, like Mr. Gardner in immigration, or Mr. Mondell in land laws, would be able to supplement that and see whether he had covered the special teld of information that a Member had gained by long service.

Mr. PICKETT. Of course, those cases are not very numerous.

Mr. MCCARTHY. Pardon me, in the general debate here, but Mr. Mondell, if Mr. Mondell were in that position and were the very best sort of a draftsman, yet, with the numerous duties that he has here, if the bill happened to be a bill of 50 sections, or 60, or 80, a tremendous long bill, it would be of great service to Mr. Mondell to have two or three men who had specialized for a long while in drafting a bill to prepare the drafts for him to go over and criticize and redraft over and over again. It is the redrafting over and over again, under the direction of a very able man like Mr. Mondell, which I think is a very valuable thing, and which has been so valuable in England, where the same thing exists. Very able men of the type of Gladstone or Lloyd-George and others have employed these men, who were for years working at that, and these men then make over and over again, for months sometimes, these bills until they get them so clear that they stand up as monuments.

Mr. GARDNER. Well, is it not true that they have no standing committees of Parliament?

Mr. MCCARTHY. No; they have what are known as the "grand committees.” Mr. GARDNER. These grand committees are merely sections of the House; but they have no standing committees where the membership extends through a session from Parliament to Parliament.

Mr. MCCARTHY. Not to the same extent as they have here. But you would find that not only a great convenience, but a necessity, in that way. I know from my own experience that in two or three of the great acts that we have had to do with in Wisconsin-of course, they are only small things as compared with a great many that you have here

Mr. PICKETT. Of course, but the members of a committee do not care to go to one of their number for the service. I am simply citing that as an illustration. I think it would be necessary to have exceptionally, well qualified men to perform this function. Mr. NELSON. Well, on that point, Mr. Pickett, I have a constituent who has written me, who desires to recover moneys that he paid for certain lands fraudulently sold him. The Government has his money. I am at a loss to know just how to prepare that bill, and in my ignorance of that particular field I have gone to Mondell, and Mondell now is doing for me that which I would like to have an expert do for me. Mr. McKIRDY. Is that all, Mr. Chairman?

Mr. EVANS. That is all.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. Ernest Bruncken, who was for five years connected with the legislative reference bureau of California, is here, and I would like to have him give us some suggestions as to the practicability of this.

The CHAIRMAN. How it works in California.

STATEMENT OF MR. ERNEST BRUNCKEN.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. How it works in California; yes. But if you will permit me, Mr. Chairman, I should like to say just a few words in connection with this last thing that was broached by the gentleman from Massachusetts. I think it will become plain to him why we advocate a bureau of this kind-that is, the bill-drafting side of it-if he takes this into consideration: Undoubtedly the members of these various committees are much more expert on the subject matters with which they deal than any member of the reference bureau, either in the bill-drafting or in the reference department proper, can ever expect to be, because they have so many things to do, assuming even that they have the same ability that the distinguished men in these committees may have. But have you ever thought that a man who is very much interested in a subject matter is the very last one to see the many objections which may arise in the minds of others, including the attorneys who will attack those bills in a court and, possibly, the judges? That is human nature. Not only the men themselves who are on these committees are deeply interested of necessity or they would not be the experts which they are in the matters which come before thei committees, but also the men who appear before these committees to advocate this bill or another bill. That was what Mr. Gardner mentioned yesterday; in some particular case he referred, I believe, to some lawyer from New York, who was very expert in that matter and had all the cases at his fingers' ends which had reference thereto. Undoubtedly true. But all that is not at all the proper work of the man who drafts that bill finally. The advantage that he has is that he is not, so to speak, interested in that particular subject. He is interested in the question how that particular subject, which has been laid before him by the committee, can be put into the form of a bill in which there is the least possible chance for an attorney, who is hired to prove to a court, if he can, that that bill means something which it did not mean, or that that bill is unconstitutional, or whatever other objection he may be able to find to that bill-now, I have lost the thread of that sentence; at any rate, he is interested in drafting a bill that will prevent that attorney from gaining his point.

The CHAIRMAN. You made that point with absolute clearness.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. It is a psychological law that you must not be interested in a subject if you are to see all sides of it. Now, what will this draftsman do? If he does work in the way I have done it under the difficult circumstances in which I was called upon to do it in California, where I did not have a large staff of competent assistants, but had to do most of the work myself, and as I often did it of necessity, not as perfectly as it should have been done-I would take the bill after I had made a rough draft of it, I would take it clause by clause and try to get the cases that I could find in which the meaning of that particular form of words, that particular clause, or that sentence, and sometimes that partciular word had been called into question, and find out what the courts decided upon it.

Mr. PICKETT. Now, right there, will you pardon an interruption? Supposing that you found two lines of authorities. For instance, suppose the courts of New York and Michigan and Wisconsin and Kansas and Nebraska had had that question before them and they had followed one rule of construction, whereas the courts of New Jersey Pennsylvania, Illinois, and some other States had followed another rule of construction. Now, would you pass upon that when you submitted the bill to the gentleman who brought it to you, or would you submit also to him the authorities so that he could also pass judgment upon the question?

Mr. BRUNCKEN. I intended to come to that very point in a moment, and I might just as well do it right now. It is this: Whenever I had the time to do it-I have not done this in all of those cases because of the limited time-they called upon me to draw an important bill in the evening and wanted it the next day. Of course, I had to tell them I could not do it; so many of those bills I had to draw in a hurry, and if this bill passes, no Member of Congress will call upon the bureau or allow them to do it in that hurried fashion. Now, in the few bills where I had the chance to do it, when I had my bill finished I presented with it to the Member asking for the bill-well, you might call it a brief or a statement of the reasons why I adopted a particular form of words rather than another, and where there was any doubt about it in many cases-in some cases, I should say I presented the alternative and the reasons. I did give him my opinion, as you say, but I also gave him the opportunity to look up the cases himself. Now, I say that is similar to what is being done in your department, Mr. McKirdy-in that connection I might call attention to this: If this more systematic manner of drawing bills is adopted by Congress they will find that they will follow very largely the rule or the system which is being followed in France and Germany, where with every bill introduced comes a pamphlet called the "motives"; in other

words, comment or explanation of the bill, which is not merely a general treatment ior report such as, of course, would be made by any committee reporting the bill to Ongress, of the reasons for the bill in general, but which deals, paragraph by paragraph, section by section, or clause by clause, with the resons, just as I stated just now, why that particular form of words was adopted rather than another. Now, that is distinctly, as I conceive it, the advantage which even your expert committees will get rom the bill-drafting features, systematized and put into the hands of a group of experts such as this bill contemplates.

Mr. GARDNER. Well, is not the French procedure a little bit different from that? Mr. BRUNCKEN. The difference is this, Mr. Gardner: That in France and Germany, as in England, all the important bills come from the Government and have been worked out in the executive departments.

Mr. GARDNER. In France they send projects of laws, do they not, to bureaus which have been selected—the bureaus are drawn by lot? The "motifs" are the equivalent of a bureau report, are they not?

Mr. BRUNCKEN. Yes; that is the same as the report of a committee in a way. But it seems as if-of course, I do not know all the details of the inner workings of the German or French departments, but I dare say also the man who draws the bill and submits it to his chief, or the man who works out the motif, the committee report, as you would call it, makes this statement in detail of his reasons for adopting one form rather than another, and, with the modification necessary under our system of legislation, it would naturally go directly to the committee from this draftsman.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Bruncken, may I ask you if the motifs submitted with the bill when sent from the bureau or department of the Government are not also a plea for the substance of the bill as well as the form?

Mr. BRUNCKEN. They are also that; yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. They are intended to set forth the reasons why the legislation should be enacted and then suggest the form?

Mr. BRUNCKEN. Yes; but so much as relates to the form is equivalent to what I have suggested the draftsman would submit to the member of a committee who had engaged his services.

Mr. GARDNER. But the bureau is not a Government bureau; the bureau is an artificial division of the Chamber of Deputies.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. I beg your pardon; you are speaking of the bureaus.

Mr. GARDNER. A bill is often practically a dummy when it is introduced, and it goes to the bureau and the bureau prepares it on the lines that the ministry lays down. Mr. BRUNCKEN. I am more familiar with the German procedure than with the French.

Mr. GARDNER. At the beginning of every session in the Chamber of Deputies they divide by lot or alphabetically generally by lot-the whole Chamber of Deputies in bureaus.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. I don't think, Mr. Gardner, that that is the procedure. The executive department draws up a bill. That bill, accompanied by this pamphlet of motives, or the motif, is introduced in Parliament. It is already finished-both the motif and the bill; in many cases it is first published before it is introduced, and submitted to the criticism of the public, and the newspapers and technical magazines are usually full of discussion of these bills.

Mr. GARDNER. As I understand, a bill is not before the French Chamber of Deputies for its readings until after it has left the bureau and gone into “commission." Mr. BRUNCKEN. Well, the commission is a large committee in which

Mr. GARDNER. I remember a few years ago the procedure in the bills known as “L'Impôt sur le Revenu" and "Le Rachat de l'Ouest." I watched it very carefully, and my impression is that you rather distorted the order in which the thing happens. Mr. BRUNCKEN. But I am pretty certain that I am right. I am quite sure that I am right as to the German procedure.

Mr. GARDNER. Very likely I may be mistaken.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. At any rate, the point which I make is that under the different procedure in this country it would be the natural time to have these motifs as to form submitted when the draftsman submits the bill.

Now, I wish to say a few words on some features of this bill, and particularly on the way in which this bureau on its reference or compiling or collecting side will dovetail, so to speak, with the present work of the Library of Congress. Of course, the Library of Congress at the present time does all it can do to assist in furnishing material and information to the Members, as, I dare say, all of you gentlemen know; at least I judge, from what I hear from my associates, that they are kept pretty busy supplying such information to Members. But the Library of Congress has not now the means of undertaking the particular detailed work of putting this-if I may use

the gentleman's term-into tabloid form. In other words, it can not digest these things. I believe that occasionally members of the Library staff have undertaken outside of Library hours to make translations of matters which Members would like to have that had been gathered from foreign countries and matters of that kind, but officially the Library has not been able to undertake this. Now, the work which the Library does at the present time in the way of bibliography and the like will not only continue as before-will not by any means be superseded, if I understand the policy; and if I am wrong, of course, the librarian will correct me-will not by any means be superseded, but will rather have an opportunity to enlarge its activities, which will be the basis and foundation of the more detailed work which the reference department will do for Congress and the various committees.

Now, to come back to the experience which I had in California. There also the connection between the reference bureau and the library is as close as possible. As a matter of fact, it was established without any express authority or appropriation from the legislature, simply by the trustees of the State library, who have a lump sum at their disposal. Therefore it was possible to make the entire staff of the library subsidiary in part to the work of the legislative reference department, and it would be impossible to say just how much of the work of the library was directly legislative reference work and how much was general reference work of which the legislature availed itself. But the point which I wish to make in that connection is that it would have been entirely impossible for myself and my assistant to do this work of bill drafting, if we could have confined our attention to that, if we had not had that library at our back-not merely as anyone else has a collection of books of which he could avail himself, but as being part of that library, so that we could suggest what the library might do in order to help our work, and so that we could call upon any of the staff of the library when necessary to help us in our work.

As to the connection required between the bill-drafting side and the reference side, I do not go so far as some of my friends and former associates have gone, in saying that it is absolutely necessary that the two should be combined; but I can readily see how, without a very close connection of the two, the work of the draftsman would be decidedly hampered, and therefore I think it is wiser to adopt the system suggested by the present bill.

Mr. NELSON. Mr. Chairman, on that point what I would like to ask Mr. Bruncken is this, whether if the draftsman's work would be hampered by lack of information, would not that information end of it become largely academic, without having a thought of being focused upon legislation, and would you not be collecting material there that would be merely collected for its own sake?

The CHAIRMAN. Raw material.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. Of course, I have no experience of any place where that has been done, but I can very readily see how the people that were doing the collecting, if they were not in constant touch with the people who must directly utilize the work, would very likely succumb to that temptation without being conscious of it. Yes; I can imagine that.

Mr. GARDNER. What is your experience with the members of the California Legislature? Do they only bring in bills for you to draft that they can not draft themselves, or is it the tendency of a man, finding somebody else to do his work for him, to shirk it? Mr. BRUNCKEN. I do not think that the average member of the legislature, any more than the average Member of Congress, is at all disposed to shirk any duty which

Mr. GARDNER. Leave us out, because if we can we always get somebody else to do things for us rather than do them ourselves.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. I do not think that that has been true at all among the members of the Legislature of California, from my observation. But my experience is this: Remember always that we were doing the work under difficulties, on account of the lack of funds and the lack of a large staff of assistants, so that it would have been a physical impossibility for the two men who could do any bill drafting at all-myself and a young assistant, such as Mr. Dean Lewis yesterday described, just from the law school-to do more than draft a very small percentage of these bills. Now, my experience was this: There were a number of important measures which had been before the people for discussion, which everybody knew were to come up for passage, that had been drawn outside. Sometimes they had been drawn by the attorney general. Sometimes they had been drawn by one of these associations of public-spirited people like the California Club-the Commonwealth Club, I mean-and sometimes they had been drafted, as perhaps you have found occasionally to have been done here, by a business man who was specially interested in having the bill passed, and had an interest more special than the rest of the people. Well, these bills rarely came to me. The men who had drawn those bills had presumably drawn them well; sometimes I had occasion to

point out, when I was consulted, that here and there was something that had better be changed, something that was obscure, ambiguous. But there were a large number of members who were precisely in this position that they knew what they anted, but they did not know how to get it. Of course, the legislatures are in a someThat different position in that regard from Congress, for the reason that has been stated here. The members do not come back very often, and there is always a very large percentage of entirely new members, who sometimes are quite helpless at first. They come to me.

During the first session, when the work was new to me and to them, there were omparatively few who came. The second session I had a great many more, and the third session it was very evident that unless I had considerably more assistance than I did have I simply could not keep up with the demand. It became evident to everybody. So that it was very apparent that there was a constant demand for this work from members who were exceedingly anxious to do the work well and do it themselves. I remember cases where private members have sat with me evenings after the legislature adjourned, and sometimes until the wee small hours, discussing particular bills. After I had drafted them we went over them together, and very often we redrafted them, because they had not quite expressed the meaning or purpose which the member had in view, or else because in discussing it he had changed his views as to the details of the bill.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Bruncken, was it your experience that a member who had applied to your bureau for assistance and received it was apt to come back?

Mr. BRUNCKEN. Yes; well, that is a personal question that might imply that my work was not satisfactory.

The CHAIRMAN. Oh, no.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. But it was decidedly my experience. It was especially noticeable in the third session. You, of course, understand that one-half of the senators hold over, and the hold-over senators, with one or two exceptions for which there were special reasons, which we understood well-it was especially the hold-over members who not only came to me during the session but long before the session opened began writing to me asking for whatever assistance I could give them.

The CHAIRMAN. My question was perhaps rather awkwardly framed. What I had in mind was the probability that any member finding that he could get assistance and a short cut to results, would be very apt to go after that short cut and those results, in that way following the lines of least resistance.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. Why, I do not know that I would call that the line of least resist

ance.

The CHAIRMAN. For him, certainly.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. Only in the sense that he presumably found a way which facilitated his work.

The CHAIRMAN. Well, I would call that the line of least resistance.

Mr. GARDNER. This gentleman asked me if I was a lawyer, and I said "No; I was not." Well, if we had had a system like this when I was in the State legislature, and all the time since I have been in Congress, I would be a good deal less of a lawyer than I am now. I had a very complicated bill to treat the other day, with regard to the United States taking part in the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, a matter that interested me because I represent a fishery district. If I could have put the drafting of that bill off on some one else, I should have done so. It was

a great deal better for the bill and its chances of passage that I should puzzle it out myself.

The CHAIRMAN. Wouldn't you learn a few things that are important, but not so much about many things that way, digging it out yourself?

Mr. GARDNER. Yes; and that is why I believe we are all, sooner or later, bound to be specialists here. That is the way legislation has got to be carried on, more or less. For instance, I make a specialty of the fisheries. When I explain the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas, I know what I am talking about. That is the only way that I can see in which legislation can be carried on. Smatterers are absolutely useless except to vote and to make speeches for home consumption.

Mr. BRUNCKEN. Mr. Gardner, may I give you an explanation? Undoubtedly you would make an expert in that particular work, but would you at the same time become familiar with the decisions which are digested in the three heavy volumes of Sutherland on Statutory Construction in the same way that this expert draftsman ought to have become, or would you be so familiar with all the decisions-now, in this particular case I suppose there would be comparatively few decisions--but could you have an expert on immigration or fisheries who would be acquainted at the same time with the statute laws of the United States in the same way that a man would be acquainted with them whose particular business was to be acquainted with them? I do not think that is physically possible.