The more the yardstick was applied, the more obvious it became that the sides would never meet on common ground. The roads clearly thought that the demands of the men were unreasonable, and rightly or wrongly, the men soon became firmly convinced that the contingent proposition might easily be interpreted by the operators so as to bring up for reconsideration every benefit which the brotherhoods had won since they signed their first trade agreement back in the eighties. The union executives declared that their men would never agree to a proposition which contained such possibilities, and on June 14th, after the conference had continued two weeks, the managers were requested to make final reply to the employees' demands.1 This answer came the following morning in the form of a joint letter to the executives of brotherhoods. In it the managers stated that nothing had developed in the conference to justify granting the extraordinary demands of the men. They emphasized that they owed a responsibility to three substantial interests the entire body of their employees, the owners of the railroads, and the public, none of which should be ignored in considering a question of this kind. In closing, they suggested that since no agreement had been reached, the proposition of the men, together with the contingent proposal of the companies, should be submitted to arbitration, preferably before the Interstate Commerce Commission, or else in accordance with the terms of the Newlands Act. The answer of the unions was made by President Garretson. Referring to the possibility of arbitration before the Interstate Commerce Commission, he pointed out that that body had already prohibited its members from acting as arbiters, because, being a rate-fixing body, it could not assume the responsibility for increases of compensation without also assuming a second duty, namely, to consider the connection between rates and wages, and this it declined to do. Arbitration under the federal act was also undesirable because of the impossibility of procuring neutral arbiters who had sufficient technical information to grasp the intricacies of the question. 'June Conference, p. 535. You have seen instances where, under the method of arbitration that is proposed, arbitrators of undoubtedly honest intent, men of as high intellectual and moral standing as exist, actuated only by the desire to do the right, found themselves confronted, after they had written it, in what they believed perfectly intelligible language, with a lack of power to apply that language with the meaning that they intended it should convey; counsel, which they employed, told them that it was an impossibility to right what they believed was a wrong they had done. This situation had created a sentiment among the men strongly unfavorable to arbitration. But least of all would the employees consent to arbitrate a proposition where "their ability to sell time" (i. e. the gains they had already secured) was to be set over against their own proposal for an eight-hour day.' Continuing, the speaker deprecated the fact that the managers had not submitted a definite counter-proposition, one which he could carry back to his men, adding that the tentative proposal of the managers was. of such sweeping character in regard to arbitraries, that it did not leave him, or any man in his position, one iota of ground upon which to stand in defense of it. Therefore, the only thing which the executives could do was to let the men vote upon the question of whether they wished to strike in order to enforce their demand.3 EDWIN CLYDE ROBBINS. UNIVERSITY OF OREGON. 'June Conference, pp. 541-544. 'Referring to the managers' willingness to arbitrate, President Garretson expressed himself as follows to the writer: "There never was a proposition made in good faith to arbitrate. Do not misunderstand this to mean that the companies did not propose arbitration, for they did, but the idea I desire to convey is that with the indefinite nature of the Conference Committee's tentative proposition and the interpretation thereof, they were perfectly aware that nothing but a refusal could take place because there was no definite proposition from the companies. There was only a generality that left the scope of arbitration as wide as the conditions of service are. In other words, it would have left the proposition to be arbitrated in exactly the same condi tion as if we had no agreements anywhere," THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF THE OF "PARSON'S CAUSE": the various important trials and lawsuits during the colonial period few have attracted more attention from the general historian than the cases growing out of the Virginia Two-Penny Act of 1758. Particularly since the appearance of the Life of Patrick Henry, by Wirt, Henry's 1 Bibliography: Sources. Perry, W. S., Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church: Virginia. Gives many important letters 1755-1769, chiefly from Virginia Clergy to the Bishop of London. Briefs of John Camm, plaintiff and appellant, and Hansford and Moss, defendants and respondents, before the Privy Council. A transcript from these briefs (from British Museum Additional Manuscripts, no. 36220, folios 52–64) is in the Library of Congress, Hardwicke Papers, vol. 872, pp. 201-279. References in this article are to the transcript. Fontaine, J. (A. Maury, editor) Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, pp. 418-424. This gives Maury's account of Patrick Henry's speech. Journals of the Virginia House of Burgesses, (H. R. McElwaine and J. P. Kennedy, editors), 1758-1761, p. 285. Hening, W. W. The Statutes-at-Large. This is a collection of all the laws of Virginia. Carter, Landon. (1764). Bland, Richard. mounted (1764). PP. 31-41. A Letter to the Bishop of London (1759); The Rector Detected A Letter to the Clergy of Virginia (1760); The Colonel DisReprinted in part in the William and Mary Quarterly, vol. xix, Camm, John. A Single and Distinct View (1763); A Review of the Rector Detected (1764). The pamphlets of Bland, Carter and Camm are summarized in the Report of the Virginia State Library, 1909. Letter of Virginia Assembly to their Agent (1759), in Virginia Magazine of History, vol. x, pp. 347-356. Secondary accounts: Henry, Wm. Wirt. Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches, vol. i. Morgan, George. The True Patrick Henry. Tyler, Moses Coit. Patrick Henry. Wirt, Wm. Tyler, Leon G. pp. 10-30. "The Two Penny Act," in William and Mary Quarterly, vol. x, Howard, George E. Preliminaries of the Revolution, pp. 87-101. speech in the "Parson's Cause" has been commonly regarded as a prophecy of the Revolution, "the first intimation of the approaching conflict." It is thus linked with James Otis's argument in the Writs of Assistance case, when, as John Adams would have it, American independence was born. A somewhat uncritical acceptance of the enthusiastic estimates of Wirt and Adams later resulted in an exaggerated idea of the importance attached to these speeches at the time. Wirt himself shows clearly that when Henry went to Williamsburg the next year "no one knew anything of him." 2 A wider study of contemporary material has resulted in a better appreciation of the real legal, constitutional and social issues involved in the whole Two-Penny-Act controversy, a controversy in which Henry's speech in Parson Maury's case was but a single incident, and not the most important one. Eckenrode, for instance, has brought out the connection of this agitation with the whole movement against the established church, culminating in the Revolutionary separation of church. and state. L. G. Tyler, in an excellent article in which he comments particularly on the determination of the Virginia. Assembly to exercise complete control over local taxation, has shown that the underlying question was "the Virginia Constitution under the British Sovereign." Some important aspects of the case, however, have been generally ignored. Even when the technical points of law involved have been correctly stated,s they have not been sufficiently emphasized. The far-reaching constitutional questions involved have thus been obscured, or at best have been stated without further elaboration." 'Cooke, Virginia, p. 378. Cf. Campbell's Virginia, p. 518: "Henry's speech ... and the verdict. in a certain sense . . . the commencement of the Rev. olution in Virginia." See also Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biography article, Henry. "Wirt's Life of Henry (4th ed.), p. 76. 3 Report of the Virginia State Library, 1909-10 (Separation of Church and State. Special Report of Dept. of Archives and History). • Wm. and Mary Quarterly, vol. 19, p. 25. As in Henry's Henry, I, 34. The best accounts are in Tyler's article, Henry's Henry, and Howard's Preliminaries. The outstanding facts in the controversy are too familiar to call for more than a brief restatement. By an Act of Assembly of 1748, confirmed by the King in 1751, the salary of the Virginia clergy was fixed at 16,000 pounds of tobacco a year. By an Act of 1753, however, two counties were ordered to pay £100 in Virginia currency instead. In June 1755 the assembly permitted two counties to pay tobacco levies in money, at a rate to be fixed by the justices of the peace.3 Later in the same year a threatened shortage in the tobacco crop led to the enactment of a law, to expire at the end of ten months, allowing the payment in money of all tobacco debts at the rate of two pence a pound. Some of the clergy protested vigorously at the time, even appealing to the Bishop of London, but, as it turned out, two pence was not far from the market value, and the matter was not pressed.5 In 1758, however, another threatened crop-failure led to a popular demand for relief. The assembly responded on October 12th by providing that all debts, public and private, contracted on a tobacco basis, might if the debtor so desired be paid in currency at the rate of two pence a pound. The act was limited in operation to a year. Since the market price of tobacco rose to about six pence, debts were naturally paid for the most part in currency. The merits or demerits of this act as a piece of legislation are not relevant to the present discussion. It has been exten-. sively denounced; but a very plausible argument can be made out for its justice and expediency as an emergency measure. The important point is that the clergy, rightly or wrongly, felt particularly defrauded; for, while the act was general in terms, they were the greatest proportional losers. As a body they sent Rev. John Camm to lay their grievances before the King in Council. The Bishop of London supported their cause, and on the recommendation of the Lords of Trade, the King on August 10, 1759, disallowed not only the act of 1758 but those 1 Hening, VI, 88. 3 Hening, VI, 502. 5 Perry, pp. 434, 440, 447. 7 Perry, p. 442. 'Hening, VI, 369. "Hening, VII, 240. |