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The Roman legislation, under which any consul, praetor, or tribune could propose to the burgesses any measure at pleasure and bring it to the vote without debate, had from the first been, irrational and had become daily more so with the growing nullity of the comitia; it was only tolerated, because in practice the senate had claimed for itself the right of previous deliberation and regularly crushed any proposal, if put to the vote without such previous deliberation, by means of the political or religious veto.

Without some such safeguard the party in control of the legislature could prevent the exercise of the judicial veto by removing from office any judges who dared to oppose its policy. New York and South Carolina were the only states adopting constitutions during the Revolutionary period, which included provisions limiting the power of the majority to impeach public officials.

All this, however, is subject to the veto and command of a European magistracy supported by a native army with European officers. The advantage of this method is that on its face it carries no clue to its real working. Indeed it can always point to certain undoubted advantages: the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of war and feud, the encouragement of peaceful industry.

Pepper Whitcomb took the Captain's veto philosophically, observing that he thought from the first the governor wouldn't let me go. I don't think Pepper was quite honest in that. But to the subject in hand. Among the few changes that have taken place in Rivermouth during the past twenty years there is one which I regret.

My veto was based on the ground that, since the Tariff Board would make, in December, a detailed report on wool and wool manufactures, with special reference to the relation of the existing rates of duties to relative costs here and abroad, public policy and a fair regard to the interests of the producers and the manufacturers on the one hand and of the consumers on the other demanded that legislation should not be hastily enacted in the absence of such information; that I was not myself possessed at that time of adequate knowledge of the facts to determine whether or not the proposed act was in accord with my pledge to support a fair and reasonable protective policy; that such legislation might prove only temporary and inflict upon a great industry the evils of continued uncertainty.

Throughout the struggle the Peoples Progressive Party had insisted upon winning popular majorities as a basis for establishing socialism in the colony by democratic methods and legal means. Imperialist reactionaries from Britain's Prime Minister and the President of the United States to the A.F. of L.-C.I.O. retorted: "No you don't", and backed up their veto with money, riots and guns.

Other such measures he vetoed unless it was clear that a two-thirds majority in each House would pass them over his veto. He preferred that the money received from the sale of public lands should be distributed among the States, believing that they, instead of the general government, should undertake the improvements necessary to the development of the country.

Imperial Rome gradually swept away the tribunitial veto, concentrated all power in the hands of the emperor, became completely centralized, and fell.

Moreover, the councilors of the several clans, four fifths of whom were women, met together to form the Tribal Council; but in this Tribal Council the women sat separate, not participating in the deliberations, but exercising only a veto power on the decisions of the men.

"They had acquired the right," we are told in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, "of proposing to the comitia tributa, or to the Senate, measures on nearly all the important affairs of the State;" and as matters stood at this time, no one Tribune could "veto" or put an arbitrary stop to a proposition from another.