or in any manner to enforce the laws.  This is altogether foreign to the purpose of an Army appropriation bill.  The practice of tacking to appropriation bills measures not pertinent to such bills did not prevail until more than forty years after the adoption of the Constitution.  It has become a common practice.  All parties when in power have adopted it.  Many abuses and great waste of public money have in this way crept into appropriation bills.  The public opinion of the country is against it.  The States which have recently adopted constitutions have generally provided a remedy for the evil by enacting that no law shall contain more than one subject, which shall be plainly expressed in its title.  The constitutions of more than half of the States contain substantially this provision.  The public welfare will be promoted in many ways by a return to the early practice of the Government and to the true principle of legislation, which requires that every measure shall stand or fall according to its own merits.  If it were understood that to attach to an appropriation bill a measure irrelevant to the general object of the bill would imperil and probably prevent its final passage and approval, a valuable reform in the parliamentary practice of Congress would be accomplished.  The best justification that has been offered for attaching irrelevant riders to appropriation bills is that it is done for convenience sake, to facilitate the passage of measures which are deemed expedient by all the branches of Government which participate in legislation.  It can not be claimed that there is any such reason for attaching this amendment of the election laws to the Army appropriation bill.  The history of the measure contradicts this assumption.  A majority of the House of Representatives in the last Congress was in favor of section 6 of this bill.  It was known that a majority of the Senate was opposed to it, and that as a separate measure it could not be adopted.  It was attached to the Army appropriation bill to compel the Senate to assent to it.  It was plainly announced to the Senate that the Army appropriation bill would not be allowed to pass unless the proposed amendments of the election laws were adopted with it.  The Senate refused to assent to the bill on account of this irrelevant section.  Congress thereupon adjourned without passing an appropriation bill for the Army, and the present extra session of the Forty-sixth Congress became necessary to furnish the means to carry on the Government.

The ground upon which the action of the House of Representatives is defended has been distinctly stated by many of its advocates.  A week before the close of the last session of Congress the doctrine in question was stated by one of its ablest defenders as follows: