The most important statute of the United States is perhaps the most horrible example of slovenliness, bad form, and contradiction of all.  The “Hepburn Act” is the amended Interstate Commerce Act, and is printed by Congress in a pamphlet incorporating with it quite a different act known as the Elkins Act, besides the Safety Appliance Act, the Arbitration Act, and several others.  We all remember under what political stress this legislation was passed, with Congress balking, the senators going one way, the attorney-general another, the radical congressmen in front, and the president pushing them all.  It is easily intelligible that such a condition of things should not tend to lucid legislation, particularly when an opposing minority do not desire the legislation at all, and hope to leave it in such a shape as to be contradictory, or unconstitutional—­or both. (This has been intentionally done more than once.) All of it a mass of contradictions or overlaying amendments, the first important part of it which came under the scrutiny of the Supreme Court only escaped being held unconstitutional by being emasculated.  Its other clauses have yet to face that dreaded scrutiny.  Its basic principle has yet to be declared constitutional, while the only principle which has proved of any value was law already.  This wonderful product of compromise starts off by saying “Be it enacted, etc., Section I as amended June 29, 1906.”  It begins with an amendment to itself.  It does not tell you how much of the prior law was repealed, except upon a careful scrutiny which only paid lawyers were willing to give.  Upon the old Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, after quoting it substantially in full, it adds a mass of other provisions, some of which are in pari materia, some not; some contradictory and some mere repetitions.  It amends acts by later acts and, before they have gone into effect, wipes them out by substitutions.  It hitches on extraneous matters and it amends past legislation by mere inference.  Like a hornet it stings in the end, where revolutionary changes are introduced by altering or adding a word or two in sections a page long, and it ends with the cheerful but too usual statement that “all laws and parts of laws in conflict with provisions of this act are hereby repealed.”  As a result no one can honestly say he is sure he understands it, any more than any serious lawyer can be certain that its important provisions are any one of them constitutional.  And that huge statute with sections numbered 1, 2, 5, 16, 16_a_, etc., with amendments added and substituted, amended and unamended, is contained in twenty-seven closely printed pages.  I venture to assert boldly that any competent lawyer who is also a good parliamentary draftsman could put those twenty-seven pages of obscurity into four pages, at most, of lucidity, with two days’ honest work.  By how little wisdom the world is governed!  And how little the representatives of the people care for the litigation or trouble or expense that their own slovenliness causes the people!  For the necessity of political compromise is no excuse for this.