t
particular moments, but with time it is apt to correct its mistakes.
We are usually in more danger of suffering from hasty legislation than
from tardy legislation. Senators are chosen for a term of six years,
and one third of the number of terms expire every second year, so
that, while the whole Senate may be renewed by the lapse of six years,
there is never a "new Senate." The Senate has thus a continuous
existence and a permanent organization; whereas each House of
Representatives expires at the end of its two years' term, and is
succeeded by a "new House," which requires to be organized by electing
its officers, etc., before proceeding to business. A candidate for the
senatorship must have reached the age of thirty, must have been nine
years a citizen of the United States, and must be an inhabitant of the
state which he represents.

The constitution leaves the times, places, and manner of holding
elections for senators and representatives to be prescribed in each
state by its own legislature; but it gives to Congress the power to
alter such regulations, except as to the place of choosing senators.

Here we see a vestige of the original theory according to which the
Senate was to be peculiarly the home of state rights.

[Sidenote: Electoral districts.]
[Sidenote: "Gerrymandering."]
In the composition of the House of Representatives the state
legislatures play a very important part. For the purposes of the
election a state is divided into districts corresponding to the number
of representatives the state is entitled to send to Congress. These
electoral districts are marked out by the legislature, and the division
is apt to be made by the preponderating party with an unfairness that is
at once shameful and ridiculous. The aim, of course, is so to lay out
the districts as to secure in the greatest possible number of them a
majority for the party which conducts the operation. This is done
sometimes by throwing the greatest possible number of hostile voters
into a district which is anyhow certain to be hostile, sometimes by
adding to a district where parties are equally divided some place in
which the majority of friendly voters is sufficient to turn the scale.
There is a district in Mississippi (the so-called Shoe String district)
250 miles long by 30 broad, and another in Pennsylvania resembling a
dumb-bell.... In Missouri a district has been contrived longer, if
measured along its windings, than the state itself,