Mathews v. United States/Opinion of the Court

by by John Marshall Harlan

United States Supreme Court

123 U.S. 182

Mathews  v.  United States

There is no foundation for appellant's claim. In U.S. v. Langston, 118 U.S. 389, 394, 6 Sup. Ct. Rep. 1185, we said that 'a statute fixing the annual salary of a public officer at a named sum, without limitation as to time, should not be deemed abrogated or suspended by subsequent enactments which merely appropriated a less amount for the services of that officer for particular fiscal years, and which contained no words that expressly, or by clear implication, modified or repealed the previous law.' The present case does not come within that rule; for the consular appropriation acts for the fiscal years ending June 30, 1883, 1884, 1885, and 1886, while recognizing the division made by the act of 1874 of consulates into classes, put the office of consul at Tangier in 'Class 5, at $2,000 per annum.' In other words, during the whole period covered by the claim in suit, the consul at Tangier was in the fifth class, and there was in force an act of congress declaring that consuls of that class should receive $2,000 per annum; in other words, that sum should be in full compensation for his services each year. The only possible object of transferring the office of consul at Tangier from the third to the fifth class was to reduce the annual salary of that officer to the sum fixed for the annual salaries of consuls of the latter class. The error in the argument in behalf of the appellant is that he gives no effect whatever to the words 'at $2,000 per annum,' to be found in every appropriation act covering the period in question. But, clearly, those acts, placing this consul in the fifth class, at $2,000 per annum, repealed, by necessary implication, so much of previous enactments, including that of June 11, 1874, as placed the consul at Tangier in the third class, at $3,000 per annum. The argument to the contrary is not at all aided by the circumstance that the diplomatic and consular appropriation act of March 3, 1887, for the first time after the passage of the act of June 11, 1874, expressly declared that the sums thereby appropriated should be 'in full compensation' for the services therein mentioned. That act was passed after the decision in Langston's Case, and the words 'in full compensation' were introduced therein, out of abundant caution, to preclude any doubt in the future as to the intention of congress.

Judgment affirmed.

Notes