constituting the merest detail, are properly separated from the broad rules of principle upon which alone the attention of the reader should be focused. Minor and subordinate details such as the blank ballots inserted in election laws may well be relegated to the rear, thus helping to clarify the law by keeping essentials in the foreground.

Just where to draw the line of demarcation in some statutes is not always easy, and although no definite rules can be laid down "as to the precise mode in which the subject-matter of a statute should be distributed between the body of an Act and its schedules," it is bad policy to hide away controversial matter in any schedule. The British Interpretation Act of 1889 illustrates very well the use of a schedule in the case of repeals: "The Acts described in The Schedule to this Act are hereby repealed to the extent appearing in the third column of the Schedule." The listing of enactments repealed thus helps to keep the law simple.103 The same thing could have been done in many Iowa laws as, for instance, in the Motor Vehicles Act of 1913: eight new sections were enacted as substitutes for those of 1911, and a schedule indicating the sections repealed would have relieved the law of much unnecessary repetition at the beginning of each section.104

Other laws in the Iowa statute books may be cited as illustrations of cases where the use of the schedule might have been expedient. A thirteen page act concerning the costs and fees to be charged by various officers is broken up by ten pages itemizing the fees; while an act relative to district courts and judges fixes the days and the months of terms to be held in every county. In each of these laws a schedule at the end might have embodied such

comparatively unimportant provisions. The law for the incorporation of the Burlington and Iowa River Turnpike Company might also have contained a schedule of the rates of toll instead of including them in section five.105

The body of the Workmen's Compensation Act is burdened with several forms, a compensation schedule, and a computation schedule: all these might well have appeared separately numbered at the end of the statute and thus have rendered the whole law less complicated and easier to understand. Section eight of the law for the inspection of weights and measures occupies nearly two pages in fixing the weight of a bushel for various commodities named: a schedule would have served better and made the body of the law more compact. For the enlightenment of the State Food and Dairy Commissioner the General Assembly established food standards 106 which, if presented in the columns of a schedule, would have brought the principles of the act closer together and at the same time have proved more useful to the officer who must consult them.

Although schedules have not been used as appendixes to Iowa statutes as often as they might have been, they have not been wholly neglected. Appropriation acts have frequently contained schedules showing the amounts into which and the different purposes for which lump appropriations to State institutions should be divided and paid. Two of the best examples of schedules are to be found in the Railroad Rate Act of 1874: a list of tariff rates for freight covers fourteen pages, and articles to be carried as freight are classified in ten pages more. These schedules appear in two sections of the act and are thus mixed up with the policy of the law whereas they

should properly be put in the background.107 Many statutes which are overloaded with administrative details and most enactments of the legislature, by the way, constitute administrative law, that is, law which creates agencies of government and defines their powers and duties might well have been drafted along lines indicated above: main principles, big features displayed first, and minor details packed away in a simple schedule at the end.

V

THE LANGUAGE OF IOWA STATUTES

Of all the criticisms leveled at the labors of legislatures in the United States the one most commonly heard concerns the language of statutes, a subject which, indeed, has long afforded food for reflection in every Englishspeaking country. At the meetings of bar associations speakers in their perennial attacks refer to laws characterized by a looseness and ambiguity of expression that leads to endless uncertainty and litigation. Others are less harsh in declaring that on the whole, considering the amount of legislation enacted it is remarkable how well the work has been done; but as a general rule statutes are criticised as a mass of verbiage — repetitions, contradictions, and ambiguities — by no means perfect in orthography, grammar, rhetoric, or punctuation. Although such observations with regard to the phraseology of legislative utterances are as old as legislation itself, they have been emphasized only since the early years of the nineteenth century.

BENTHAM'S CRITICISMS

Jeremy Bentham directed attention to the fact that ancient Greek lawgivers invited poetry to aid them in writing law and never "thought of addressing the people in the barbarous language that disgraces our statutebook, where the will of the legislator is drowned in a sea of words." By way of comparison he ridiculed the English lawmakers who, "habited in a Gothic accoutrement

of antiquated phrases, useless repetitions, incomplete specifications, entangled and never-ending sentences . . merely, from incomprehensibility, inspire terror, but cannot command respect." He declared that it was a matter of astonishment "why the arbiters of our life and of our property, instead of disporting themselves in this grotesque and abject garb, cannot express themselves with clearness, with dignity, and with precision: the best laws would be disfigured if clothed in such language. "'108 These words of one hundred years ago are no less applicable to the statutes of Iowa and of other American States to-day.

IDEAL QUALITIES OF LEGAL LANGUAGE

The language of Iowa statutes owes its character to two factors: the organs or persons from whom the laws proceed and the methods of composition employed by them. Now, James Bryce briefly indicates what qualities legal language should possess:

In point of Form, the merit of Law consists in brevity, simplicity, intelligibility, and certainty, so that its provisions may be quickly found, easily comprehended, and promptly applied.109

That such an ideal of perfection can be striven after but never quite achieved by a democracy seems to be the inference of another writer when he asserts:

So many conflicting energies go to the making of a statute that it is not surprising to find incompleteness of expression, inconsistencies of wording, and even uncertainty of meaning and intention.110

A perusal of the session laws of Iowa reveals the manner in which they have been penned, and so, in the following pages it is proposed to examine Iowa statutes in the light of Bryce's suggestions as to the nature of the language which statutes ought to possess.