Windscheid's Pandekten explains the Roman law in the light of the most modern opinions; and a reader curious upon any special subject will generally get a good start, and will find the names of the best known works, in v. Holtzendorff's Rechtslexicon, which forms the second part of his valuable Encyclopädie der Rechtswissenschaft. EDS.

"TO THE EDITORS OF THE AMERICAN LAW REVIEW, BOSTON, MASS.:"AUSTIN, TEXAS, Oct. 16, 1877.

"Gentlemen, - In your notice (October No., 1877) of the first volume of Jackson & Jackson's Report of Cases decided by the Court of Appeals of Texas,' you have fallen into an error in supposing that, by the constitution of Texas, 'the reports of the highest court of the State present nothing but criminal decisions.'

"The fact is, that the Court of Appeals is the highest court only for criminal cases. The Supreme Court of the State is the highest court in all civil matters; and its decisions are well and regularly reported by Messrs. Terrell & Walker.

"The Court of Appeals only has civil appellate jurisdiction in petty cases coming up from the county courts. The Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction of all civil cases originating in the District Courts.

"The constitutional provision dispensing with the publication of the decisions of the Court of Appeals in civil cases, was intended to preserve uniformity of decisions, by having but one appellate court to lay down the law in civil cases, instead of two. "The new constitution of Texas is certainly not, in many respects, a model instrument; but its framers have not been guilty of the folly that you have attributed to them, of publishing only the decisions of its highest court in criminal cases.

"Yours respectfully,

"C. S. WEST."

We gladly give place to this welcome addition to our review of the Reports of the Court of Appeals of Texas; and can only plead, as an excuse for the mistake our correspondent has pointed out, lack of familarity with the courts of that State since the recent Constitution was adopted.—EDS.

"The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the mighty.” — PROV. Xviii. 18.

THERE are two classes of amendments which have been suggested by way of substitute for the present constitutional provision touching the election of the president: (1) Those which do, and (2) those which do not, propose for their main or sole object the selection of a man who belongs to the largest political party. It is a sad fact in our politics that we have thought and quarrelled so much and so often over the question, whether this party or that one has succeeded in getting "most votes ;" that intelligent men have come to assume it as an unassailable premise that this is the only question about presidential elections which we can be called upon to consider, and that the solution of it will be the end of all the troubles which those elections so surely entail upon us. The plan for direct election of presidents by the people, proposed by Senator Morton, the only amendment yet proposed which has gained any considerable prominence, is based upon this premise. That prominence is due neither to the reputation of the author nor to the merits of the plan, but simply to the fact that such direct election by the people is the obvious, natural substitute for the present electoral machinery, which everybody wishes to have abolished, because it is manifestly dangerous. It is fair to say that the whole direct object of Senator Morton's amendment is merely to secure a president who is the leader of the political party which polls the largest vote. There can be no question that such an end is very desirable, if our choice lies only between

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it and the dangerous uncertainty of the present law. But that is not true.

Is it necessary, then, or well, that we should make the presidency the sure reward of party victory? That is the gravest question in American politics. It is a question which the people are not disposed to consider; but it is a question which those who would save our institutions and our people from slow, perhaps, but certain, ruin must consider. It is a question beside which finance, Southern outrage, Southern oppression, peculation, freetrade, civil-service reform, great questions as they are, sink into almost insignificance. And this, simply because all of them are included in it. Once secure presidential elections from direct and national partisan control; place the presidential chair beyond the reach of combined party effort; devise a plan by which a president will be chosen as a man, and on his own merits, and not as the head of a great, national, political party, - and we are secured from all those evils which we now so justly dread. This may seem like assuming away all of our troubles; but it is not. Unless such clear-headed constitutional lawyers as Kent and Story and Chief Justice Marshall, and such statesmen as Roger Sherman and Crittenden, and a host of other great men of smaller unless all these, after their mature reflection, were in error, there is such a thing possible as electing our presidents without any great national party contest at all. This can be done (and it can only be done) by some scheme which renders the success of parties dependent on something else than their own efforts. So long as the presidency remains the granted property of political parties, so long will those parties continue to combine against every vital interest of our country the venality and excitement and corruption that are now the regular and necessary incidents and consequences of our presidential elections.

name,

Mr. George William Curtis, in a series of editorials in Harper's Weekly, lately called the attention of the country to the constitutional amendment touching presidential elections, proposed by the late Judge S. S. Nicholas, formerly Justice of the Supreme Court of Kentucky. Mr. Curtis says of it,

"It is an ingenious but simple plan, in which lot or chance plays a chief part, but in such a way as to stimulate the selection of the best men without intrigue. . . . It is the suggestion of careful students of our political system who wish to provide against evils which experience has revealed.

It springs from the conviction that some defence must be devised against the mad fury of party spirit, some plan which will certainly remove the presidency from the grasp of merely ambitious and corrupt designs. It assumes that the election of the legislature, which determines the national policy and controls the purse and the sword to maintain it, is the true arena for party difference, and that the executive should be, as far as practicable, non-partisan."

The plan is briefly this: An electoral college is to be chosen by the States, every State sending at least one elector, and also one additional elector for each additional million of its population over the first. The president and vice-president are to be chosen from the members of this college; and for that purpose all the electors are arranged alphabetically into six classes, and the classes numbered from one to six, by lot. The first class then selects, by vote, one of the electors from the second class; the second class, in turn, selects one from the third; and so on with the succeeding classes, the sixth class choosing from the first. Thus, there are six chosen electors selected from the whole college, and out of these six two are now drawn BY LOT. The whole college then chooses, by vote, one of these two to be president, and the other is vice-president.

"The main idea upon which this amendment is based is to have it so arranged that by no possibility the presidential chair can ever become the subject of a general, national party contest; that it cannot be certainly attained by any amount of individual or party effort; and that ambition may exhaust all its energies, and corruption expend all its stores, without a certainty of success?"

The plan interposes chance between desire for the office and election to it, and, by thus destroying all certainty of success, extinguishes, or at least reduces, corrupt effort to attain it.

At the risk of wearying the reader, but to secure a clear understanding of the plan, it will be well to repeat the statement of it in a different form. Under it, each State will elect from among its own citizens at least one elector; and, if a populous State, it would elect more. New York, with over five millions of people, would have six electors. Delaware, with less than a million, would have one. From all the States, with our present population, there would be about fifty-nine electors. Now, these fifty-nine electors (unlike those who are chosen under the present law) would actually meet together at Washington, and select a president and vice

president from among their own number. To do so, they would be alphabetically arranged into six classes, of as nearly equal numbers as may be, any surplus members being distributed among the classes by lot. The electors being thus classed, the classes (to prevent combination among them) are numbered from one to six, by lot. Class one then selects, by vote, one member from class two; class two, in turn, selects one member of class three; class three likewise selects from class four; and so on; class six selecting from class one. Thus, there are six electors chosen, by vote, from the fifty-nine electors constituting the whole college. (Now here comes the most marked peculiarity of the plan.) Out of these six electors, so selected by this sifting process from the whole college, two are drawn by lot, and the whole college then elects one of them to be president.

Now, let us suppose this plan to be adopted and operating as a law. How would it operate? To ascertain this, let the reader suppose himself aspiring to the presidency. That the plan may be rigorously tested, let him suppose himself for the time a corrupt, wealthy, popular man, of national reputation. And now let us ask him the question, How are you to be elected?

In the first place, remember that there will be no national party convention to nominate you. What could it meet for? The president is now to be chosen from the electors, not simply by them; and the electors are chosen in and by their own States. It would be absurd for a national convention to meet to nominate an elector for Massachusetts or Kentucky, and hence there would no longer be such an institution. That would be one acceptable improvement upon our present plan; for our presidents are now practically chosen by national-party mobs.

own.

But "how are you to be elected"? Manifestly, you have little interest in cultivating popularity in any other State than your You cultivate it there; and we will suppose that you are chosen elector for your own State. This is supposing a very possible, but an extreme, case; for it is certainly true that each State would be as desirous to send its best man to the college, as it now is to elect its best man governor or United States senator; and certainly the average governor or senator is of the very best class of American office-holders. We must conclude, then, that the electoral college, notwithstanding the exception in your case, and perhaps some others, will be, in general, composed of men who are