vanished, except as regards questions of revenue and expenditure, because the centre of gravity has shifted from the House to the committees.

It lessens the cohesion and harmony of legislation. Each committee goes on its own way with its own bills just as though it were legislating for one planet and the other committees for others. Hence a want of policy and method in congressional action. The advance is haphazard; the parts have little relation to one another or to the whole.

It gives facilities for the exercise of underhand and even corrupt influence. In a small committee the voice of each member is well worth securing, and may be secured with little danger of a public scandal. The press cannot, even when the doors of committee rooms stand open, report the proceedings of fifty bodies; the eye of the nation cannot follow and mark what goes on within them; while the subsequent proceedings in the House are too hurried to permit a ripping up there of suspicious bargains struck in the purlieus of the Capitol, and fulfilled by votes given in a committee. I do not think that corruption, in its grosser forms, is rife at Washington. It appears chiefly in the milder form of reciprocal jobbing, or (as it is called) "log-rolling." But the arrangements of the committee system have produced and sustain the class of professional "lobbyists,” men, and women too, who make it their business to "see" members and procure, by persuasion, importunity, or the use of inducements, the passing of bills, public as well as private, which involve gain to their promoters.

It reduces responsibility. In England, if a bad Act is passed or a good bill rejected, the blame falls primarily upon the ministry in power, whose command of the majority would have enabled them to defeat it, next upon the party which supported the ministry, then upon the individual members who are officially recorded to have "backed" it and voted for it in the House. The fact that a select committee recommended it and comparatively few bills pass through a select committee would not be held to excuse the default of the ministry and the majority. But in the United States the ministry cannot be blamed, for the Cabinet officers do not sit in Congress; the House cannot be blamed because it has only followed the decision of its committee; the committee may be

an obscure body, whose members are too insignificant to be worth blaming. The chairman is possibly a man of note, but the people have no leisure to watch fifty chairmen: they know Congress and Congress only; they cannot follow the acts of those to whom Congress chooses to delegate its functions. No discredit attaches to the dominant party, because they could not control the acts of the eleven men in the committee room. Thus public displeasure rarely finds a victim, and everybody concerned is relieved from the wholesome dread of damaging himself and his party by negligence, perversity, or dishonesty. Only when a scandal has arisen so serious as ́to demand investigation is the responsibility of the member to his constituents and the country brought duly home.

It lowers the interest of the nation in the proceedings of Congress. Except in exciting times, when large questions have to be settled, the bulk of real business is done not in the great hall of the House but in this labyrinth of committee rooms and the lobbies that surround them. What takes place in view of the audience is little more than a sanction, formal indeed but hurried and often heedless, of decisions procured behind the scenes, whose mode and motives remain undisclosed. Hence people cease to watch Congress with that sharp eye which every principal ought to keep fixed on his agent. Acts pass unnoticed, whose results are in a few months discovered to be so grave that the newspapers ask how it happened that they were allowed to pass.

It throws power into the hands of the chairmen of committees, especially, of course, of those which deal with finance and with great material interests. They become practically a second set of ministers, before whom the departments tremble, and who, though they can neither appoint nor dismiss a postmaster or a tide-waiter, can by legislation determine the policy of the branch of administration which they oversee. This power is not necessarily accompanied by responsibility, because it is largely exercised in secret.

It enables the House to deal with a far greater number of measures and subjects than could otherwise be overtaken; and has the advantage of enabling evidence to be taken by those whose duty it is to re-shape or amend a bill. It replaces the system of interrogating ministers in the House which prevails

in most European chambers; and enables the working of the administrative departments to be minutely scrutinized.

It sets the members of the House to work for which their previous training has fitted them much better than for either legislating or debating "in the grand style." They are shrewd, keen men of business, apt for talk in committee, less apt for wide views of policy and elevated discourse in an assembly. The committees are therefore good working bodies, but bodies which confirm congressmen in the intellectual habits they bring with them instead of raising them to the higher platform of national questions and interests.

Summing up, we may say that under this system the House despatches a vast amount of work and does the negative part of it, the killing off of worthless bills, in a thorough way. Were the committees abolished and no other organization substituted, the work could not be done. But much of it, including most of the private bills, ought not to come before Congress at all; and the more important part of what remains, viz. public legislation, is dealt with by methods which secure neither the pressing forward of the measures most needed, nor the due debate of those that are pressed forward.

Why, if these mischiefs exist, is the system of committee legislation maintained?

It is maintained because none better has been, or, as most people think, can be devised. "We have," say the Americans, "three hundred and fifty-six members in the House, most of them eager to speak, nearly all of them giving constant attendance. The bills brought in are so numerous that in our two sessions, one of seven or eight months, the other of three months, not one-twentieth could be fairly discussed on second reading or in committee of the Whole. If even this twentieth were discussed, no time would remain for supervision of the departments of State. That supervision itself must, since it involves the taking of evidence, be conducted through committees.

CHAPTER XV

CONGRESSIONAL LEGISLATION

LEGISLATION is more specifically and exclusively the business of Congress than it is the business of governing parliaments such as those of England, France, and Italy. We must therefore, in order to judge of the excellence of Congress as a working machine, examine the quality of the legislation which it turns out.

Acts of Congress are of two kinds, public and private. Passing by private acts for the present, though they occupy a large part of congressional time, let us consider public acts. These are of two kinds, those which deal with the law or its administration, and those which deal with finance, that is to say, provide for the raising and application of revenue. devote this chapter to the former class, and the next to the latter.

I

There are many points of view from which one may regard the work of legislation. I suggest a few only, in respect of which the excellence of the work may be tested; and propose to ask: What security do the legislative methods and habits of Congress offer for the attainment of the following desirable. objects? viz.:

1. The excellence of the substance of a bill, i.e. its tendency to improve the law and promote the public welfare.

2. The excellence of the form of a bill, i.e. its arrangement and the scientific precision of its language.

3. The harmony and consistency of an act with the other acts of the same session.

4. The due examination and sifting in debate of a bill.

5. The publicity of a bill, i.e. the bringing it to the knowledge of the country at large, so that public opinion may be fully expressed regarding it.

6. The honesty and courage of the legislative assembly in rejecting a bill, however likely to be popular, which their judg ment disapproves.

7. The responsibility of some person or body, of persons for the enactment of a measure, i.e. the fixing on the right shoulders of the praise for passing a good, the blame for passing a bad, act.

The criticisms that may be passed on American practice under the preceding heads will be made clearer by a comparison of English practice. Let us therefore first see how English bills and acts stand the tests we are to apply to the work of Congress.

1. In England, as the more important bills are government bills, their policy is sure to have been carefully weighed. The ministry have every motive for care, because the fortunes of a first-class bill are their own fortunes. If it is rejected, they fall. A specially difficult bill is usually framed by a committee of the Cabinet, and then debated by the Cabinet as a whole before it appears in Parliament.

2. In England, government bills are prepared by the official government draftsmen, two eminent lawyers with several assistants, who constitute an office for this purpose.

3. The harmony of one government bill with others of the same session is secured by the care of the official draftsmen, as well as by the fact that all emanate from one and the same ministry. No such safeguards exist in the case of private members' bills, but it is of course the duty of the ministry to watch these legislative essays, and get Parliament to strike out of any one of them whatever is inconsistent with another measure passed or intended to be passed in the same session.

4. Difficult and complicated bills which raise no political controversy, after having been debated on second reading are sometimes referred to a select committee, which goes through them and reports them as amended to the House. They are afterwards considered, first in committee of the Whole, and then by the House on the stage of report from committee of the Whole to the House.

5. Except in the case of discussions at unseasonable hours, the proceedings of Parliament are so far reported in the leading newspapers and commented on by them that bills, even