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1 J. Hampden Dougherty, The Election of a President - A Drama in Three Acts 1 (1908)

handle is hein.presidents/enptdateat0001 and id is 1 raw text is: The Election of a President - A Drama in Three Acts By J. HAMPDEN DOUGHERTY THE most desolating wars of history have arisen from disputes over accession to the sovereign power of a nation. Nothing much worse in the catalogue of disasters could befall this land than a controversy about the election to the Presidency of the United States. One such happened thirty years ago, and it carried us almost to the brink of civil war. To many persons the question which arose for settlement in 1877 was novel and extraordinary, and once determined, seemed unlikely to recur. It brought to them a vision of evil which it were best quickly to banish from memory. But others knew that the crisis of that year was something which the wisest of statesmen had been predicting and expecting almost from the foundation of the government. The solution of 1877 was reached by means of a special enactment creating a commission to pass upon all disputed returns and report to Congress, both houses of which bound themselves to accept every decision of the commission which they did not jointly agree to overthrow-an agreement so extraordinary in its nature as to be without a parallel. The Democratic party would never have consented to the measure but for its belief that it would control eight of the fifteen members of the electoral tribunal. The electoral commission law stands almost alone in the history of Congressional legislation as a statute enacted to meet a particular emergency. No justifiable optimism can lead us to believe that such a law will be enacted again. The law grew out of the enigmatical language of the constitution regarding the count of the votes of Presidential electors. The Constitu- tion uses a passive form of expression-the votes shall then be counted. Copyright, 1908, by the Forum Publishing Company. Reprinted, by permission, from the Forum for November, 1908.