The Telegraph-courier. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1888-1946, 1915-10-14
SUGGESTS FEWER SESSIONS
Believes Three or Four Years Often
Enough for Solons to Meet, AS Most
Bills Begin With "To Repeal" and
''To Amend" Than ''To Create

In q talk before the Wisconsin Fed
GRAFTON of Women IS clubs in conven-
ton at Lacrosse, Mrs. Mary ID. Brad
ford today expressed herself as in
favor Of more work and fewer sessions
for the legislature and said that tri-
ennial or quadrennial sessions are
plenty as one Legislature spends much
of it's time repeating and amending
the laws of it's predecessors without
any particular advantage to the
taxpayers.
Mrs. Bradford subject was "'Legis-
lation on Educational Questions" and
she devoted most Of her time to speci-
fic bills touching educational interests
In the state, ifty-eight of which
originated in the assembly and forty
one in the senate. According to Mrs.
Bradford IS report all of these but
thirty-two were lost somewhere along
the line, one getting as far as the gov
ernor's chair before it met it's Water
loo through his veto
In view of our recent legislative
experiences, said Mrs Bradford "and
in view of the great expense it entail
ed, would it not be a good thing for
the state, if this more democracy
referred to was the cure for the ills Of
democracy, should manifest itself in a
popular demand for an amendment to
Section 4, Article 4, of the state consti-
tuition, to the effect that we should
have quadrennial or at least tri-
ennial session of the legislature, in
stead of the biennial session as now?
One effect Of this would be welcome
rest from the disturbance caused by
our present biennial political upheaval;
we should then have time to try out
laws educational and otherwise; legis-
lators could really know the worthless
ness or the worth of existing laws, and
could move more judiciously in their
acts to amend, to repeal, and TO
create. "
In Mrs. Bradford s opinion several
of the bills that lost their lives en-
route would have been valuable addi-
tions to the statutes. On the other
hand it seemed to her and others who
were watching legislation in the inter
ests of the schools that everything of
a constructive nature that had been
passed in the past twenty years was
being attacked,
Much she said, "of this legisla-
tion was aimed at the University of
Wisconsin and at the normal schools.
Had they passed, serious consequences
would, no doubt, have resulted to those
institutions. The methods of attack
necessitated a defensive vigilance on
the part of the friends of higher edu-
cation only a little less active than
that necessitated by analogous opera
tions in modern warfare, those of the
air raider and sapper''
Mrs. Bradford characterized the bill
passed increasing the tuition of non
resident students in the university as
essentially wrong in principle and
prophesies that the day will come when
it will be ssen that the arguments
used in favor of the bill were as short
sighted as were the arguments of Ke-
noshans in lS45 when they fought the
levying of a tax for the support of the
first public school in our state, on the
ground that it was imposing a tax for
the education of other people s children.
The speaker commented most favor
ably upon the bill which raises the pay
of country school teachers each year
they are retained in given school.
At the conclusion of the paper which
was remarkable for its attention to
detail, Mrs. Bradford says:
"The experience cited and others
like it, cause us who are engaged in
educational work to endorse without
reservation one of DIR. O'Shea's edi-
torial paragraphs in the September
number of the Wisconsin Journal of
Education. He says: Educational re-
form in this state has become alto
gether too complex to be handled the
W. most of the educational bills in
the last Legislature were handled.
Still the wonder grows that men who
have made no critical study of educa-
ton, who have not practiced it, who
do not know what modern tendencies
are, who have not studied the educa-
tional situation in the various sections
Of the state should, practically without
council, decide the educational policies
and destinies Of the state. "