National Affairs: 1,006 Anachronisms

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¶The President is authorized to employ in his official household . . . one private secretary ... at $3,500 ... one assistant secretary who shall be a shorthand writer . . . two executive clerks . . . one steward . . . one messenger.

¶The Army of the U. S. shall consist of one general, one lieutenant general, three major generals, six brigadier generals . . . 30 chaplains . . . one band . . . and not more than 30,000 enlisted men.

¶Women may be allowed to accompany troops as laundresses in numbers not exceeding four to a company. . . . Laundresses shall be entitled to receive one ration daily.

¶No person who has served in the military or naval service of the so-called Confederate States during the late rebellion shall be appointed a cadet (at the U. S. Military Academy).

¶Any loyal person, a citizen of the U. S., of good moral character, shall be permitted to trade with any Indian tribe upon giving bond to the U. S. with at least two good sureties.

¶No issue of fractional notes of the United States shall be of a less denomination than 10¢.

In 1874 when all Federal enactments were dovetailed together in the Revised Statutes of the United States, the foregoing and many another like them were high class modern laws. In 1926 all general and permanent laws of the U. S. were codified in one big fat volume. The Code is not the law itself but simply a presumption of what the law is. The statutes cited above were considered too out-of-date to get into the Code, despite the fact that they were still rooted in the Revised Statutes.

Last week the House of Representatives threw its lawmaking machinery into reverse to sweep the books clean of obsolete statutes. After five minutes debate it passed a bill repealing 1,006 old sections of the Revised Statutes and sent the measure to the Senate. The legal effect of such legislation was to fit the Revised Statutes precisely to the Code, thereby, for all practical purposes, making the Code the law of the land. The omnibus repealer provided that the elimination of these 1,006 old statutes was not to be interpreted that they were really the law when wiped off the books.

The statutes repealed covered everything governmental from the reapportionment of Congress in 1873 with 292 members to a 10¢ charge for administering Federal oaths. Section after section had to do with details of government in Territories which have since become States; with the allotment of public lands to homesteaders; with the rigmarole of Civil War pensions; with Congressional employes (for the House: "28 pages, including three riding-pages"); with queer old revenue laws including an inheritance tax scaling up from 1% to 6% depending on the degree of kinship between the heirs and the deceased.