committee, but the latter does not necessarily base its bills upon or in any way regard that report. Neither does it in preparing them start from an estimate of the sums needed to support the public service. It does not, because it cannot: for it does not know what grants for the public service will be proposed by the spending committees, since the estimates submitted in the Secretary's letter furnish no trustworthy basis for a guess. It does not, for the further reason that the primary object of customs duties has for many years past been not the raising of revenue, but the protection of American industries by subjecting foreign products to a very high tariff.

When the revenue bills come to be debated in committee of the whole House, similar causes prevent them from being scrutinized from the purely financial point of view. Debate turns on these items of the tariff which involve gain or loss to influential groups. Little inquiry is made as to the amount needed and the adaptation of the bills to produce that amount and no more. It is the same with ways and means bills in the Senate. Communications need not pass between the committees of either House and the Treasury. The person most responsible, the person who most nearly corresponds to an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, or a French Minister of Finance, is the chairman of the House committee of Ways and Means. But he stands in no official relation to the Treasury, and is not required to exchange a word or a letter with its staff. Neither, of course, can he count on a majority in the House.

The business of spending money belongs primarily to two standing committees, the old committee on Appropriations and the new committee on Rivers and Harbors, created in 1883. The committee on Appropriations starts from, but does not adopt, the estimates sent in by the Secretary of the Treasury, for

the appropriation bills it prepares usually make large and often reckless reductions in these estimates.

Every revenue bill must, of course, come before the House; and the House, whatever else it may neglect, never neglects the discussion of taxation and money grants. These are discussed as fully as the pressure of work permits, and are often added to by the insertion of fresh items, which members interested in getting money voted for a particular purpose or locality suggest. These bills then go to the Senate, which forthwith refers them to its committees. The Senate committee on finance deals with revenue-raising bills; the committee on appropriations with supply bills. Both sets then come before the whole Senate. Although it cannot initiate appropriation bills, the Senate has long ago made good its claim to amend them, and does so without stint, adding new items and often greatly raising the total of the grants. When the bills go back to the House, the House usually rejects the amendments; the Senate adheres to them, and a conference committee is appointed, consisting of three senators and three members of the House, by which a compromise is settled, hastily and in secret, and accepted, usually in the last days of the session, by a hard-pressed but reluctant House. Even as enlarged by this committee, the supply voted is usually found inadequate, so a deficiency bill is introduced in the following session, including a second series of grants to the departments.

There is practically no connection between the policy of revenue raising and the policy of revenue spending, for these are left to different committees whose views may be opposed, and the majority in the House has no recognized leaders to remark the discrepancies or make one or other view prevail. There is no relation between the amount proposed to

be spent in any one year, and the amount proposed to be raised.

The knowledge and experience of the permanent officials either as regards the productivity of taxes, and the incidental benefits or losses attending their collection, or as regards the nature of various kinds of expenditure and their comparative utility, can be turned to account only by interrogating these officials before the committees.

Under the system of congressional finance here described America wastes millions annually. But her wealth is so great, her revenue so elastic, that she is not sensible of the loss. She has the glorious privilege of youth, the privilege of committing errors without suffering from their consequences.

CHAPTER XV.

THE RELATIONS OF THE TWO HOUSES

The creation by the Constitution of 1789 of two chambers in the United States, in place of the one chamber which existed under the Confederation, has been usually ascribed by Europeans to mere imitation of England. There were, however, better reasons than deference to English precedents to justify the division of Congress into two houses and no more. Not to dwell upon the fact that there were two chambers in all but two of the thirteen original States, the Convention of 1787 had two solid motives for fixing on this number, a motive of principle and theory, a motive of immediate expediency.

The chief advantage of dividing a legislature into two branches is that the one may check the haste and correct the mistakes of the other. This advantage is purchased at the price of some delay, and of the weakness which results from a splitting up of authority. If a legislature be constituted of three or

more branches, the advantage is scarcely increased, the delay and weakness are immensely aggravated. Two chambers can be made to work together in a way almost impossible to more than two.

To these considerations there was added the practical ground that the division of Congress into two houses supplied a means of settling the dispute which raged between the small and the large States. The latter contended for a representation of the States in Congress proportioned to their respective populations, the former for their equal representation as sovereign commonwealths. Both were satisfied by the plan which created two chambers, in one of which the former principle, in the other of which the latter principle, was recognized. The country remained a federation in respect of the Senate, it became a nation in respect of the House: there was no occasion for a third chamber.

The respective characters of the two bodies are wholly unlike those of the so-called upper and lower chambers of Europe. Both equally represent the people, the whole people, and nothing but the people. Both have been formed by the same social influences. Both are possessed by the same ideas, governed by the same sentiments, equally conscious of their dependence on public opinion. The one has never been, like the English House of Commons, a popular pet, the other never, like the English House of Lords, a popular bugbear.

The two branches of Congress have not exhibited that contrast of feeling and policy which might be expected from the different methods by which they are chosen. In the House the large States are predominant: ten out of forty-five (less than one fourth) return an absolute majority of the representatives. In the Senate these same ten States have only twenty members out of ninety, less than a fourth of the

whole. In other words, these ten States are more than sixteen times as powerful in the House as they are in the Senate. But as the House has never been the organ of the large State, nor prone to act in their interest, so neither has the Senate been the stronghold of the small States, for American politics have never turned upon an antagonism between these two sets of commonwealths.

The faults of the House are mainly due, not to want of talent among individuals, but to its defective methods, and especially to the absence of leadership. The merits of the Senate are largely due to the fact that it trains to higher efficiency the ability which it has drawn from the House, and gives that ability a sphere in which it can develop with better results. Were the Senate and the House thrown into one, the country would lose more by losing the Senate than it would gain by improving the House, for the united body would have the qualities of the House and not those of the Senate.

Collisions between the two Houses are frequent. Each is jealous and combative. Each is prone to alter the bills that come from the other; and the Senate in particular knocks about remorselessly those favorate children of the House, the appropriation bills. The fact that one House has passed a bill goes but a little way in inducing the other to pass it; the Senate would reject twenty House bills as readily as one. Deadlocks, however, disagreements over serious issues which stop the machinery of administration, are not common. The country knows that either House would yield were it unmistakably condemned by public opinion. The executive government goes on undisturbed, and the worst that can happen is the loss of a bill which may be passed four months later, Even as between the two bodies there