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Two of history's sharpest justifications of far-ranging congressional investigations were penned during the years when Congress was probing into governmental corruption and big business. The respective authors: Justices Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black, who last week joined the Earl Warren majority in sharply condemning the broad range of questioning pursued by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

WROTE Harvard Law Professor Frankfurter in the New Republic in 1924, while the Teapot Dome scandal and the skulduggery of Attorney General Harry Daugherty were being revealed: "Undoubtedly, the names of people who have done nothing criminal or wrong, or nothing even offending taste perhaps, have been mentioned in connection with these investigations . . . But where so much that the Department of Justice was doing under Daugherty was not innocent, it is highly important that even innocent transactions in the general field of fraud and suspicion be explained in order to separate the sheep from the goats. The question is not whether people's feelings here and there may be hurt, or names 'dragged through the mud,' as it is called. The real issue is whether the danger of abuses and the actual harm done are so clear and substantial that the grave risks of fettering free congressional inquiry are to be incurred by artificial and technical limitations . .

"The procedure of congressional investigations should remain as it is. No limitations should be imposed by congressional legislation or standing rules. The power of investigation should be left untrammelled, and the methods and forms of each investigation should be left for determination of Congress and its committees as each situation arises. The safeguards against abuse and folly are to be looked for in the forces of responsibility which are operating from within Congress, and are generated from without."

WROTE Alabama's Senator Black in Harper's in 1936, at the peak of his fame as a congressional investigator of utility lobbies: "An investigation is precisely what it purports to be--an investigation. Sometimes attempts are made to discredit it by calling it a fishing expedition. It is not a trial based upon an indictment where the facts are already known and merely need presentation to a jury. It is a study by the government of circumstances which seem to call for study in the public interest. And the public hearing is usually, certainly in important investigations, preceded by a long period of extensive research.

"The job which confronts an investigating committee is a formidable one indeed. It must go into records, accounts, business files, public files . . . Witnesses have declined to answer questions from time to time. The chief reason advanced has been that the testimony related to purely private affairs. In each instance with which I am familiar, the House and Senate have steadfastly adhered to their right to compel reply, and the witness has either answered or been imprisoned . . .

"Public investigating committees, formed from the people themselves or from their public representatives . . . have always been opposed by groups that seek or have special privileges. The spokesmen of these greedy groups never rest in their opposition to exposure and publicity. That is because special privilege thrives in secrecy and darkness and is destroyed by the rays of pitiless publicity."

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