Please, Sir, to mark these words.
“It was a maxim, that those who feel can best judge. This end would, he thought, be best attained, if money affairs were to be confined to the immediate representatives of the people.”[37]
Mr. Gerry, in urging the restraint upon the Senate, said:—
“The other branch was more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings.”[38]
How, Sir, can the people hold the purse-strings, unless they hold the bills by which the purse is appropriated?
And Colonel Mason broke forth in language clearly revealing his sense of danger against which to guard.
“If the Senate can originate, they will, in the recess of the legislative sessions, hatch their mischievous projects for their own purposes, and have their money bills cut and dried (to use a common phrase) for the meeting of the House of Representatives.”[39]
I repeat, then, according to the reason of the rule, the great appropriation bills must be embraced by the prohibition.
Secondly. There is a further consideration, founded on the familiar use of the term money bills throughout the debates in the Convention, as applicable to bills which the Senate cannot originate. I need not occupy time by reference to instances; but whoever takes the trouble to investigate the matter in Mr. Madison’s report of the debates, and also in the report of the Virginia Convention, will find that this term is universally employed,—unless, indeed, where Mr. Gouverneur Morris uses the broader term “money plans,”[40] and Mr. Gerry “money matters.”[41] Now all these phrases are clearly applicable to “appropriation bills,” by which the Government is carried on; and the inference seems irresistible, that the parties who used them must have had such bills in mind.