the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as in effect, and ordered its publication. Other orders have been signed by other department heads, and they purported to have the same effect as if they had been signed by the President. For example, Secretary of War William Howard Taft signed Executive Order 348-A, dated August 29, 1905, to define the boundaries of a proposed military reservation on reclaimed harbor land at Manila, Philippine Islands.

As late as 1906, Executive Orders were treated with the utmost informality. Executive Order 396 dated in 1906 (but not by month and day) is simply an endorsement on a letter written by Senator Knute Nelson, making a certain woman eligible for re-instatement as a classified laborer in the Department of Agriculture.

On February 18, 1936, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 7298 to be effective on March 12, 1936. It prescribed a uniform manner of preparing proposed Executive Orders and proclamations including their filing and publication. Executive Order 7298 was later superseded by Executive Order 10006 of October 11, 1948; this in turn was superseded by Executive Order 11030, issued on June 19, 1962. The latter Order remains in effect. C. Subject Matter of Executive Orders.

In use from the earliest days of the Republic the Executive Order was at first employed mainly for the disposition of the public domains, for the withdrawal of lands for Indian, military, naval, and lighthouse reservations, or for other similar public purposes. Later it was used frequently for the creation, alteration, or disposition of forest, oil, gas and coal reserves, and for the withdrawal of public lands from sale or entry for purposes of accurate classification. It was also used to establish, transfer, and abolish land offices

and land districts, supplementing acts of the Congress.

The Executive Order became an essential instrument in the evolution of the Civil Service, blanketing into the classified service additional positions as authorized by law, promulgating rules for the service, and exemptions from those rules, both with and without the approval of the Civil Service Commission. It was used to effect various regulations applying to governmental employees outside as well as inside the growing classified service. It established days of mourning for the death of famous citizens. It extended Indian trust period allotments.

The Executive Order was also employed to give public notice of changes of general interest in the regulations governing the consular and diplomatic service. Customs districts and offices were set up or altered by Executive Orders. Army regulations on punishments, both in peace and war, and allowances for subsistence and housing are set forth by the President through this vehicle.

During World War I, the use of the Executive Order was widened, as executive authority and power increased and its scope greatly broadened. Important agencies such as the Food Administration, the Grain Corporation, the War Trade Board and the Committee on Public Information were set up by Executive Orders. Also, Presidential powers, which vastly increased in wartime, were specifically delegated to subordinate officers by Executive Orders.

During the New Deal era in the 1930's, the use of Executive Order was widened, both in the administration of the recovery from the depression and in reform programs and in the evolution of the defense and war projects.

Important agencies with great powers, such as the National Labor Board and the War Trade Board, were created by Executive Orders. Relief funds were allocated to specific agencies, NRA codes were approved, and part of the machinery for farm loans and the establishment of the AAA were set up by Executive Orders.

The use of Executive Orders has decreased in number from the 1930's and 1940's but their scope as to their function and powers has been broadened. Executive Order 11605, dated July 2, 1971 granted to the Subversive Activities Control Board new, sweeping powers to investigate various organzations and groups in America to determine if they are intelligently or politically dangerous to the security of the Nation. Executive Order 11708,

dated March 23, 1973, which relates to the Executive Salary Schedules, may involve millions of taxpayers' dollars, notwithstanding the fact that under it the Congress does have a veto if it acts before a specified date.

Executive Order 11748, dated December 4, 1973 created a Federal Energy Office with powers over Energy matters which affect the lives of all citizens of the United States.

D. Numbering of Executive Orders.

The earliest Executive Orders were not numbered. The numbering of Executive Orders seems not to have been instituted until 1907, when the Department of State began to assign numbers to all Executive Orders which it then had in its files and as it received new orders as issued. The order which it designated as Executive Order 1 was issued by the authority of President Lincoln on October 20, 1862 and concerned the establishment of military courts in Louisiana.

Although all Presidential Orders prior to 1935 were supposed to be deposited with the Department of State, a majority of the earlier orders were in fact, never deposited. It seems that thousands of such orders were simply filed away in the Federal agencies' files and were soon forgotten. Many of such unnumbered orders, when later uncovered, seem in retrospect to have been of great importance. For example, an unnumbered Executive Order dated April 7, 1917, issued on the day after the war was declared on Germany, allowed the removal of any Government employee when his retention was deemed inimical to the public welfare. Because of this lack of system in filing Executive Orders and the custody involved, no one knows exactly how many Executive Orders have ever been issued. It is possible that some, even thousands, today lie in dusty files of Federal agencies and departments, untouched for years. It is also thought that numerous orders may lie in unexplored Presidential papers. Former Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes once estimated that the number of unnumbered Executive Orders exceeded 15, 000, while others have placed the figure as high as 50,000. Occasionally, even at this late date an unnumbered and forgotten Executive Order is uncovered and made public.

After the Department of State began numbering in 1907 the Executive Orders which it then had on file and later received, numerous Executive Orders have been uncovered or orders which when issued were classified and have been later de-classified, have been received and numbered. These orders have been given such suffixes as A, B, C, 1/2 or -1, etc, to be used with the number of the Executive Order corresponding to the nearest date when issued. Such examples are Executive Order 23-1; Executive Order 106 1/2;

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Executive Order 130A; Executive Order 310B; Executive Order 344C; and Executive Order 301 6X. Because of this type of numbering there are several hundred more numbered Executive Orders than the number given to the latest Executive Order.

In 1935 the Congress enacted the Federal Register Act (44 U. S. c. 1501, et seq. ). This Act required that every Executive Order be filed with the Division of the Federal Register, rather than the Department of State, and it is this Division which now assigns numbers to Executive Orders. Thus in recent years there have been virtually no unnumbered Executive Orders (with the possible exception of classified Executive Orders, discussed in a later section of this report.)

Numbers of Executive Orders run consecutively.

In 1951, a pro

posal to change the numbering of Executive Orders to an annual series was abandoned, largely as the result of opposition from the Department of Justice and the National Archives.

E. Publication of Executive Orders

As pointed out earlier in this paper, prior to 1907 Executive Orders were issued in an unsystematic manner, and there was no complete central file of all Executive Orders. In 1895 there was started the "Documentary Catalog" which listed every Executive Order printed in slip form (i.e., as a single printed sheet) by the Government Printing Office, but there was no central publication or codification.

The Federal Register Act of 1935 (44 U.S. C. 1501, et seq.) finally brought some order out of the chaos into which the filing of Executive Orders had fallen since 1789. This act provided for the custody of Executive Orders