PHILANDER CHASE KNOX

on the judgment of the • Privy Council that the release by the Canadian court was without authority of law. Since he became a Senator of the United States, Mr. Knox has continued to direct his public career along the paths of the law as far as possible, for which his member ship on the Judiciary Committee of the Senate adds to and emphasizes his oppor tunities. It is manifest that he steadily deepens his learning and his grasp of legal questions, especially in constitutional law. His speeches in and out of the Senate bear abundant evidences of the growth and mastery in these directions which natural inheritances and sustained industry give him. Thus his speech on the reasonable ness and lawfulness of the general features of the President's rate regulation policy at Pittsburgh in November, 1905, like his exhaustive speech on railroad rate regula tion in the Senate in March, 1906, were most valuable contributions to the discus sion of the subject, and were reflected in the law as it ultimately passed. Of his Pitts burgh speech on this subject Senator Dolliver said in the course of the closing debates on the rate bill in the Senate: "In drafting this bill the framers of it were guided very largely by the speech delivered at Pittsburgh by the honorable Senator from Pennsylvania, a speech which reads almost like a judgment from the Supreme bench." And Mr. Justice Moody, who was then Attorney General, said upon the same subject in the fall of 1906 in a speech in Pennsylvania : "For no man was more potential in the framing of that law than was the junior Senator from Pennsylvania. None stood more firmly at the back of President Roosevelt, and I wish to say now, and I consider myself honored in saying it, that on every principle of law involved in that bill there was not an iota of difference between the Senator from Pennsylvania and myself." Senator Knox's intellectual honestv as

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a lawyer and his courage are well illustrated by his speech and vote on the ' resolution that Senator Smoot of Utah was not entitled to a seat as Senator — in spite of the importunities and demands directed against him, — on the ground that the Constitution prescribes no mental or moral qualifications and as to the qualifications actually prescribed, the Senate judges of their existence by a majority vote, and that as to matters affecting moral or mental fitness, the States are the judges in the first instance, subject however to the Senate's power to expel by a two-third vote when a status of offense extends into the Senatorial service, which question can only be made after a Senator takes his seat. On the merits Senator Knox's attitude was that if the Mormon Church teaches and encourages polygamy, the fact that Senator Smoot is a monogamist and has always set his face and lifted, up his voice against polygamy relieves him from any odium attached to the church, and if, on the other hand, the church is not teaching and encouraging polygamy, the argument against Smoot wholly falls, the logic of the matter in either case leading to Senator Smoot 's complete vindication. In his address to the graduating classes of the Yale Law School last summer on the development of the Federal power to regu late commerce, Senator Knox emphasized the necessity of maintaining strictly the • distinction between national power and state power in the field of commerce, laying down the propositions that the power to regu late commerce between the States does not carry the power to prohibit unless thepurpose of the prohibition is to facilitate or protect legitimate commercial intercourse or is for the accomplishment of some other legiti mate national purpose, and that the power to regulate interstate commerce does not permit the placing of an arbitrary embargo upon the lawful products of a State, nor give any right to defeat the policy of a State as to its own internal affairs.