tenets, the majority will reject it; if no party question arises they usually adopt the view of the committee.
7. What has been said already will have shown that except as regards bills of great importance, or directly involving party issues, there can be little effective responsibility for legislation. The member who brings in a bill is not responsible, because the committee generally alters his bill. The committee is little observed and the details of what passed within the four walls of its room are not published. The great parties in the House are but faintly responsible, because their leaders are not bound to express an opinion, and a vote taken on a nonpartisan bill is seldom a strict party vote. Individual members are no doubt responsible, and a member who votes against a popular measure, one for instance favoured by the working men, will suffer for it.2 But the responsibility of individuals, most of them insignificant, half of them destined to vanish, like snowflakes 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 fact that the majority in both belongs to the same 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 many 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,3 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, 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 possess this gift, the Americans have been content to leave their political machinery unreformed. Persons who propose comprehensive reforms are suspected as theorists and faddists. The national inventiveness, active in the spheres of mechanics and moneymaking, spends little of its force on the details of governmental methods, and the interest in material development tends to diminish the interest felt in politics. Nevertheless a certain change of attitude is evidenced by the much greater attention now given in the universities to the teaching of the principles and practice of government and administration.
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 lawmaking body. The powers of Congress are limited to comparatively few subjects: its failures are supposed seldom to touch the general well-being of the people, or the healthy administration of the ordinary law.
The faults of bills passed by the House are often cured by the Senate, where discussion, if not conducted with a purer public spirit, is at least 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 Speaker had and the managing committee now has, through their control of business in the House, what practically amounts to a veto upon bills; and not a few thus perish.
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.
Finance is a sufficiently distinct and important department of legislation to need a chapter to itself; nor does any legislature devote so large a 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,1 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 lays before it, together with a full statement of the revenue and expenditure of the past twelve months, estimates of the expenditure for the coming twelve months, and suggestions for the means of meeting that expenditure by taxation or by borrowing. He embodies these suggestions in resolutions on which, when the House has accepted them, bills are grounded imposing certain taxes or authorizing the raising of a loan. The House may of course amend the bills in details, but no private member ever proposes a taxing bill, for it is no concern of anyone’s except the ministry to fill the public treasury.2 The estimates prepared by the several administrative departments (Army, Navy, Office of Works, Foreign Office, etc.), and revised by the Treasury, specify the items of proposed expenditure with much particularity, and fill three or more bulky volumes, which are delivered to every member of the House. These estimates are debated in Committee of the Whole House, explanations being required from the ministers who represent the Treasury and the several departments and are passed in a long succession of separate votes. Members may propose to reduce any particular grants, but not to increase them; no money is ever voted for the public service except that which the Crown has asked for through its ministers. The Crown must never ask for more than it actually needs, and hence the ministerial proposals for taxation are carefully calculated to raise just so much money as will easily cover the estimated expenses for the coming year. It is reckoned almost as great a fault in the finance minister if he has needlessly overtaxed the people, as if he has so undertaxed them as to be left with a deficit. If at the end of a year a substantial surplus appears, the taxation for next year is reduced in proportion, supposing that the expenditure remains the same. Every credit granted
