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 belong

1 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.

ing 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 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."

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,

1 Congressional Government, pp. 99-101.

2 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.

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.

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.

The President's veto kills off some vicious measures. He 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. dent accepts this responsibility.

A good Presi

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,' 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

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.