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filed with "the clerk of the town board of auditors." (The section before its amendment required the petition to be filed with the county clerk.) There was at the time of this amendment, no such officer as "the clerk of the town board of auditors." As the filing of such a petition was jurisdictional and lay at the foundation of all the proceedings, this blunder rendered the drainage law useless, until a subsequent legislature corrected it.

Sec. 25 of the Practice Act as it originally stood, provided that no amendment should be cause of continuance unless the party affected thereby should make affidavit that in consequence thereof he was unprepared to proceed to or with the trial of the cause at that term. The legislature of 1875 amended it by adding, "stating in such affidavit what particular fact or facts the party expects to prove by such evidence," etc. These added words presuppose that the cause for asking delay is that the party wishes to obtain evidence of certain facts, but what precedes these words says nothing whatever about proving any facts or obtaining evidence for the purpose.

The words "such evidence" have no predicate in the section or in the act. If it were a matter of grammar simply this error would be of little consequence, but the amendment throws the whole section into doubt. Before the change, the court might have given a continuance for any sufficient reason shown in the affidavit, but since it is not clear whether the absence of evidence is the only ground upon which a continuance can be granted, or whether if the cause is something else than the absence of evidence, the section is to be construed as before the amendment. I do not see that the practice commission has noticed this matter.

In 1877, the legislature passed an act, entitled, "An Act to prevent and punish wrongs to children." That act was composed of five sections, and in the compilation of the Revised Statutes it appears as Sections 42-a, 42-b, 42-c, 42-d and 42-e of Chapter 38, "Criminal Code." A gentleman interested

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in children, got himself elected to the legislature of 1895, for the special purpose, as he told me, of improving the law about cruelty to children. He got in his work in the shape of an amendment to that act. The act he got passed is entitled, "An Act to amend an Act, entitled, An Act to prevent and punish wrongs to children." The enacting clause reads as follows: Be it enacted, etc., "that Sections 42-a, 42-b, 42-c, 42-d, 42-e and 53 be amended so as to read as follows: It does not state to what act, chapter or book these sections belong. For all that appears in the act or the title to the act, they may be sections of the Revenue Act or of Mother Goose Melodies. Even if it had said "of Hurd's Revised Statutes of 1877," it is doubtful if that would have been sufficient. The reference should have been to Sections 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of an act entitled, "An Act to prevent and punish wrongs to children." The Section 53, which the author of the bill no doubt intended to amend, is the original Section 53 of the "Act to revise the law in relation to criminal jurisprudence," but no reference whatever is made to that act. This act does not stand alone in this respect. There have been several other instances to which I might refer you, where, after amending the sections mentioned in the title and enacting clause, the act goes on to amend other sections not mentioned.

But these blunders in the technical structure of the Act are far outdone in the substance of the Act itself. Let me quote Section 42-e: "Whoever shall be guilty of cruelty to any child in any of the ways mentioned in this act, or in the foregoing sections, 42-a, 42-b, 42-c, 42-d, shall be fined not less than $5.00 nor more than $200, and any Justices of the Peace or Police Justices or Police Magistrates, shall have original jurisdiction in all such cases. 1st. By cruelly beating, torturing, tormenting, over-working, mutilating or causing or knowingly allowing the same to be done. 2d. By unneces sarily failing to provide any child in his or her charge or

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custody with proper food to eat, or shelter and raiment. By abandoning any child."

3d.

Usually, Justices or Police Magistrates get jurisdiction to punish offenders by means of some writ. If we may believe all that is said, Justices of the Peace are very ingenious in devising ways of increasing their business, but I think no one but some person habituated to disciplining dependent children would have thought of putting it into the statutes, that any Justice or Police Magistrate might get jurisdiction over an offender "by cruelly beating, torturing, tormenting, overworking, or mutilating any child in his charge or custody, or causing or knowingly allowing the same to be done."

The history of these amendmnets is substantially this: some case arises in or out of court, in which it is believed it would have been better if the law had been otherwise than it is found to be, so an amendment is drawn up and introduced into the legislature to cover that particular point. Usually no examination is made of other parts of the statutes to see how they stand related to the section proposed to be amended, or how many repeals by implication will be effected. Frequently, not even the section itself is critically examined. It may be that it had been modified or repealed by some later act; if so, to recite it in the amendatory act, will be to give the whole section new life and thereby repeal by implication the act by which it was before repealed or modified by implication. This will be the effect even though the last amendment is for an entirely different purpose. The section being re-enacted as a whole and being the last expression of the legislature, it of course repeals everything inconsistent with it. Several such cases have occurred.

The result of this inconsiderate, careless way of legislating, is to fill the statutes with illy digested and contradictory enactments; to increase litigation and bring contempt upon all law. It is not enough that the legislator be satisfied of the fairness of a proposed law. He should consider whether it

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is in harmony with existing laws; what enactments, if any, it will modify or repeal, and how; and if it is desirable on the whole to make the proposed change, it is his duty to see to it that it is done in such a manner that it can be easily and clearly understood. The fewer amendments by implication the better.

It is not the purpose of this paper to give a list of the mistakes that have been made since the revision of 1874. This would be a tedious undertaking. Many of the worst cannot be made plain without extensive quotations, and others can only be appreciated in their application to actual cases.

The Supreme Court in L. & N. R. R. Co. vs. City of East St. Louis, 134 Ill., 656, approved in Callon vs. City of Jacksonville, 147 Ill., 118, has decided that the amendment of a section repeals that section so that it can no longer be referred to as a section of the original act and consequently a subsequent amendatory act referring to it as a section of the original act is invalid. The question arose upon Section 19, Art. 9, of the City and Village Act. That section was first amended in 1887, and again in 1889. The latter amendatory act described it as Section 19, Article 9, of the City and Village Act, without noticing the first amendment. The language of the Court is as follows: "The amendment of 1889 is, however, invalid. It purports to be an amendment of Sec. 19, and of an act entitled, 'An act to provide for the incorporation of cities and villages, approved April 10, 1872, in force July 1, 1872.' That section had been previously amended by the enactment of a distinct and complete section in 1887. This amendment operated as a repeal of the act of 1872. Therefore, when the amendment of 1889 was passed, Section 19 of the act of 1872 was not in existence, and was not the subject of amendment." Notwithstanding these decisions, the legislature has kept on amending amended sections without noticing the previous amendments. Some of them are of the first importance. I will call your attention to only two or three as samples: Sec

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tion 4 of "An act to provide for fees of certain officers therein named in Counties of the third class" was amended in 1883, and again in 1897. The last amendment makes no reference to the former amendment, but treats the section as still Section 4 of the original act. It covers substantially all the fees of County Clerks in Counties of the third class, including those in the levying and collection of taxes.

If the decisions of the Supreme Court to which I have referred are good law, the County Clerk of Cook County is demanding and collecting illegal fees. If the last amendment had decreased his fees instead of increasing them, as it does, I have no doubt he would have agreed with the Court, but as it is, he evidently thinks their decisions are bad law.

Section 3 of the act, with reference to printing and distributing ballots, nomination of candidates, etc., has been amended a second time without noticing the fact that it had been previously amended. This is an important part of the election law, prescribing as it does the manner of nominating candidates for office. Its validity in its present shape rests upon whether the decision to which I have called your attention is good or bad law.

In 1897, the legislature passed a second amendatory act purporting to amend Sec. 1, Art. 7 of the City Election Law, without noticing the fact that it had been amended in 1895. This second amendment very materially increases the salaries of the election commissioners and their clerks; and although I have in this case, as in others, by a note at the bottom of the section, called attention to these decisions of the Supreme Court, I understand the commissioners and their clerks are drawing their salaries at the increased rates the same as if it were good law. They, no doubt, also differ with the Supreme Court.

But the legislature in 1899, following a precedent set in a number of other cases, amended the City Election Act by reciting all of its sections as amended. It provides that "An