debates, and from the tendency of all small and secret bodies to intrigues and compromises, compromises in which general principles of policy are sacrificed to personal feeling or selfish interest. Bills which go in black or white come out gray. The member who has introduced a bill may not have a seat on the committee; and may therefore be unable to protect his offspring. Other members of the House, masters of the subject but not members of the committee, can only be heard as witnesses. Although therefore there are full opportunities for the discussion of the bill by the committee, it often emerges in an unsatisfactory form, or is quietly suppressed, because there is no impetus of the general opinion of the House or the public to push it through. When the bill comes back to the House the chairman or other reporting member of the committee generally moves the previous question, after which no amendment can be offered. Debate ceases and the bill is promptly passed or lost. In the Senate there is a better chance of discussion, for the Senate, having more time and fewer speakers, can review to some real purpose the findings of its committees.

5. As there is no debate on the introduction or on the second reading of a bill, the public is not necessarily apprised of the measures which are before Congress. An important measure is

of course watched by the newspapers and so becomes known: minor measures go unnoticed

6. The general good-nature of Americans, and the tendency of members of their legislatures to oblige one another by doing reciprocal good turns, dispose people to let any bill go through which does not injure the interest of a party or of a person. Such good-nature counts for less in a committee, because a committee has its own views and gives effect to them. But in the House there are few views, though much impatience. The House has no time to weigh the merits of a bill reported back to it. Members have never heard it debated. They know no more of what passed in the committee than the report tells them. If the measure is palpably opposed to their party tenets, the majority will reject it: if no party question arises they usually adopt the view of the committee.

7. What has been said already will have shown that except as regards bills of great importance, or directly involving party issues, there can be little, effective responsibility for legislation. The member who brings in a bill is not responsible, because the

The committee is little

committee generally alters his bill. observed and the details of what passed within the four walls of its room are not published. The great parties in the House arc but faintly responsible, because their leaders are not bound to express an opinion, and a vote taken on a non-partisan bill is seldom a strict party vote. Individual members are no doubt responsible, and a member who votes against a popular measure, one for instance favoured by the working men, will suffer for it.1 But the responsibility of individuals, most of them insignificant, half of them destined to vanish, like snow-flakes in a river, at the next election, gives little security to the people.

The best defence that can be advanced for this system is that it has been naturally evolved as a means of avoiding worse mischiefs. It is really a plan for legislating by a number of commissions. Each commission, receiving suggestions in the shape of bills, taking evidence upon them, and sifting them in debate, frames its measures and lays them before the House in a shape which seems designed to make amendment in details needless, while leaving the general policy to be accepted or rejected by a simple vote of the whole body. In this last respect the plan may be compared with that of the Romans during the Republic, whose general assembly of the people approved or disapproved of a bill as a whole, without power of amendment, a plan which had the advantage of making laws clear and simple. At Rome, however, bills could be proposed only by a magistrate upon his official responsibility; they were therefore comparatively few and sure to be carefully drawn. The members of American legislative commissions have no special training, no official experience, little praise or blame to look for, and no means of securing that the overburdened House will ever come to a vote on their proposals. There is no more agreement between the views of one commission and another than what may result from the majority in both belonging to the same party. Hence, as Mr. Wilson observes, "The legislation of a session does not represent the policy of either the majority or the minority: it is simply an aggregate of the bills recommended by committees composed of members from both sides of the House and it is known to be usually not

The member who has taken this course is the worse off, because he rarely has an opportunity of explaining by a speech in the House his reason for his vote, and is therefore liable to the imputation of having been "got at" by capitalists.

the work of the majority men upon the committees, but compromise conclusions bearing some shade or tinge of each of the variously coloured opinions and wishes of the committee men of both parties. Most of the measures which originate with the committees are framed with a view of securing their easy passage by giving them as neutral and inoffensive a character as is possible. The manifest object is to draw them to the liking of all factions. Hence neither the failure nor the success of any policy inaugurated by one of the committees can fairly be charged to the account of either party."

"1

Add to the conditions above described the fact that the House in its few months of life has not time to deal with one-twentieth of the twelve thousand bills which are thrown upon it, that it therefore drops the enormous majority unconsidered, though some of the best may be in this majority, and passes many of those which it does pass by a suspension of the rules which leaves everything to a single vote, and the marvel comes to be, not that legislation is faulty, but that an intensely practical people tolerates such defective machinery. Some reasons may be suggested tending to explain this phenomenon.

Legislation is a difficult business in all free countries, and perhaps more difficult the more free the country is, because the discordant voices are more numerous and less under control. America has sometimes sacrificed practical convenience to her dislike to authority.

The Americans surpass all other nations in their power of making the best of bad conditions, getting the largest results out of scanty materials or rough methods. Many things in that country work better than they ought to work, so to speak, or could work in any other country, because the people are shrewdly alert in minimizing such mischiefs as arise from their own haste or heedlessness, and have a great capacity for self-help.

Aware that they have this gift, the Americans are content to leave their political machinery unreformed. Persons who propose comprehensive reforms are suspected as theorists and crotchet - mongers. The national inventiveness, active in the spheres of mechanics and money-making, spends little of its force on the details of governmental methods.

1 Congressional Government, pp. 99-101.

This can be done by a two-thirds vote during the last six days of a session and on the first and third Mondays of each month.

The want of legislation on topics where legislation is needed breeds fewer evils than would follow in countries like England or France where Parliament is the only law-making body. The powers of Congress are limited to comparatively few subjects: its failures do not touch the general well-being of the people, nor the healthy administration of the ordinary law.

The faults of bills passed by the House are often cured by the Senate, where discussion is more leisurely and thorough. The committee system produces in that body also some of the same flabbiness and colourlessness in bills passed. But the blunders, whether in substance or of form, of the one chamber are frequently corrected by the other, and many bad bills fail owing to a division of opinion between the Houses.

He

The President's veto kills off some vicious measures. does not trouble himself about defects of form; but where a bill seems to him opposed to sound policy, it is his constitutional duty to disapprove it, and to throw on Congress the responsibility of passing it “ over his veto" by a two-thirds vote. good President accepts this responsibility.

A

CHAPTER XVII

CONGRESSIONAL FINANCE

FINANCE is a sufficiently distinct and important department of legislation to need a chapter to itself; nor does any legislature devote a larger proportion of its time than does Congress to the consideration of financial bills. These are of two kinds: those which raise revenue by taxation, and those which direct the application of the public funds to the various expenses of the government. At present Congress raises all the revenue it requires by indirect taxation,1 and chiefly by duties of customs and excise; so taxing bills are practically tariff bills, the excise duties being comparatively little varied from year to year.

The method of passing both kinds of bills is unlike that of most European countries. In England, with which, of course, America can be most easily compared, although both the levying and the spending of money are absolutely under the control of the House of Commons, the House of Commons originates no proposal for either. It never either grants money or orders the raising of money except at the request of the Crown. Once a year the Chancellor of the Exchequer lays before it, together with a full statement of the revenue and expenditure of the past twelve months, estimates of the expenditure for the coming twelve months, and suggestions for the means of meeting that expenditure by taxation or by borrowing. He embodies these suggestions in resolutions on which, when the House has accepted them, bills are grounded imposing certain taxes or authorizing the raising of a loan. The House may of course amend the bills in details, but no private member ever proposes a taxing bill, for it is no concern of any one except the ministry to fill the public treasury. The estimates 1 During the Civil War, direct taxes were levied; and many other kinds of taxes besides those mentioned in the text have been imposed at different times.

2

Of course a private member may carry a resolution involving additional expenditure; but even this is at variance with the stricter constitutional doctrine