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 the fact that the Housc in its few months of life has not time to deal with one twentieth of the 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 phe

nomenon.

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 selfhelp.

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 colorlessness 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. A good President accepts this responsibility.

CHAPTER XIV

CONGRESSIONAL FINANCE

No legislature devotes 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 Secretary of the Treasury sends annually to Congress a report containing a statement of the national income and expenditure and of the condition of the public debt, together with remarks on the system of taxation and suggestions for its improvement. He also sends what is called his Annual Letter, enclosing the estimates, framed by the various departments, of the sums needed for the public services of the United States during the coming year. So far the Secretary is like a Euro

pean finance minister, except that he communicates with the chamber on paper instead of making his statement and proposals orally. But here the resemblance stops. Everything that remains in the way of financial legislation is done solely by Congress and its committees, the Executive having no further hand in the matter.

The business of raising money belongs to one committee only, the standing committee of Ways and Means, consisting of eleven members. This committee prepares and reports to the House the bills needed for imposing or continuing the various customs duties, excise duties, etc. The report of the Secretary has been referred by the House to this 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 appropiations 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 hardpressed 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