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may prove resultless, to diminish the taste for foreign enterprises, and to save the country from being entangled with alliances, protectorates, responsibilities of all sorts beyond its own frontiers.

The Senate may and occasionally does amend a treaty, and return it amended to the President. There is nothing to prevent it from proposing a draft treaty to him, or asking him to prepare one, but this is not the practice. For ratification a vote of two-thirds of the senators present is required. This gives great power to a vexatious minority, and increases the danger, evidenced by several incidents in the history of the Union, that the Senate or a faction in it may deal with foreign policy in a narrow, sectional, electioneering spirit. When the interest of any group of States is, or is supposed to be, against the making of a given treaty, that treaty may be defeated by the senators from those States. They tell the other senators of their own party that the prospects of the party in the district of the country whence they come will be improved if the treaty is rejected and a bold aggressive line is taken in further negotiations. Some of these senators, who care more for the party than for justice or the common interests of the country, rally to the cry, and all the more gladly if their party is opposed to the President in power, because in defeating the treaty they humiliate his administration. Thus the treaty

may be rejected, and the settlement of the question at issue indefinitely postponed. It may be thought that a party acting in this vexatious way will suffer in public esteem. This happens in extreme cases; but the public are usually so indifferent to foreign affairs, and so little skilled in judging of them, that offences of the kind described may be committed with practical impunity. It is harder to fix responsibility on a body of senators than on the executive; and whereas the executive has usually an interest in settling diplomatic troubles, whose continuance it finds annoying, the Senate has no such interest, but is willing to keep them open so long as some political advantage can be sucked out of them.

Does the control of the Senate operate to prevent abuses of patronage by the President? To some extent it does, yet less completely than could be wished. When the majority belongs to the same party as the President, appointments are usually

arranged between them with a new pmmarily to party interests. When the majority as opposed to the Fresilent, they are tempted to agree to his worst appointments, beause such appointments discredit him and his party with the poetry, and benne a theme of hostile comment in the text det been smpair the initiative is lia nu the nominat confirming Senate, whom pot things being so it may be Dochtel whether this era tire finetion of the sedate & Dom & valuable tart

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The judicial funetion of the Senate is to sit as a High C for the trial of persons impeacel by the House of Representatives. The senators are on cath or affirmatic and a vite of two-thirds of those present is needed for a conviction. Of the process, as affecting the President. I have spoken in Chapter IV. It is applicable to other officials. Besides President Johnson, six persons in all have been impeachel, vin:

Four Federal julges, of vlod, two were agritted, and two convicted, one for viclence and drinkenness, the other for having joined the Secessionists of 1861. Impediment is the only means by which a Federal judge can be got rid of.

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One senator, who was acquitted for want of jurisdiction, the Senate deciding that a senatorship is not a "civil office" within the meaning of Art. iii. § 4 of the Constitution.

One minister, a secretary of war, who resigned before the impeachment was actually preferred, and escaped on the ground that being a private person he was not impeachable.

Rarely as this method of proceeding has been employed, it could not be dispensed with; and it is better that the Senate should try cases in which a political element is usually present, than that the impartiality of the Supreme Court should be exposed to the criticism it would have to bear, did political questions come before it. Many senators are or have been lawyers of eminence, so that so far as legal knowledge goes they are competent members of a court.

CHAPTER XI

THE SENATE: ITS WORKING AND INFLUENCE

THE Americans consider the Senate one of the successes of their Constitution, a worthy monument of the wisdom and foresight of its founders. Foreign observers have repeated this praise, and have perhaps, in their less perfect knowledge, sounded it even more loudly.

The aims with which the Senate was created, the purposes it was to fulfil, are set forth, under the form of answers to objections, in five letters (lxi.-lxv.), all by Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist. These aims are the five following:

To conciliate the spirit of independence in the several States, by giving each, however small, equal representation with every other, however large, in one branch of the National government.

To create a council qualified, by its moderate size and the experience of its members, to advise and check the President in the exercise of his powers of appointing to office and concluding treaties.

To restrain the impetuosity and fickleness of the popular House, and so guard against the effects of gusts of passion or sudden changes of opinion in the people.

To provide a body of men whose greater experience, longer term of membership, and comparative independence of popular election, would make them an element of stability in the government of the nation, enabling it to maintain its character in the eyes of foreign States, and to preserve a continuity of policy at home and abroad.

To establish a Court proper for the trial of impeachments, a remedy deemed necessary to prevent abuse of power by the executive.

1 See also Hamilton's speeches in the New York Convention.-Elliot's Debates, ii. p. 301 sqq.

All of these five objects have been more or less perfectly attained; and the Senate has acquired a position in the government which Hamilton scarcely ventured to hope for. In 1788 he wrote: "Against the force of the immediate representatives of the people nothing will be able to maintain even the constitutional authority of the Senate, but such a display of enlightened policy, and attachment to the public good, as will divide with the House of Representatives the affections and support of the entire body of the people themselves."

It may be doubted whether the Senate has excelled the House in attachment to the public good; but it has certainly shown greater capacity for managing the public business, and has won the respect, if not the affections, of the people, by its sustained intellectual power.

The Federalist did not think it necessary to state, nor have Americans generally realized, that this masterpiece of the Constitution-makers was in fact a happy accident. No one in the Convention of 1787 set out with the idea of such a Senate as ultimately emerged from their deliberations. It grew up under the hands of the Convention, as the result of the necessity for reconciling the conflicting demands of the large and the small States. The concession of equal representation in the Senate induced the small States to accept the principle of representation according to population in the House of Representatives; and a series of compromises between the advccates of popular power, as embodied in the House, and those of monarchical power, as embodied in the President, led to the allotment of attributes and functions which have made the Senate what it is.

When the work which they had almost unconsciously perfected was finished, the leaders of the Convention perceived its excellence, and defended it by arguments in which we feel the note of sincere conviction. Yet the conception they formed of it differed from the reality which has been evolved. Although they had created it as a branch of the legislature, they thought of it as being first and foremost a body with executive functions. And this, at first, it was. The traditions of the old Congress of the Confederation, in which the delegates of the States voted by States, the still earlier traditions of the executive councils, which advised the governors of the colonies

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