An English member's re

organized leadership in Congress. sponsibility usually takes the form of his being bound to support the leader of his party on all important divisions. In America, this obligation attaches only when the party has "gone into caucus," and there resolved upon its course. Seeing that the member need not obey the leader, the leader cannot be held responsible for the action of the rank and file. As a third cause we may note the fact that owing to the restricted competence of Congress many of the questions which chiefly interest the voter do not come before Congress at all, so that its proceedings are not followed with that close and keen attention which the debates and divisions of European Chambers excite.

One may say in general that the reciprocal action and reaction between the electors and Congress, what is commonly called the "touch" of the people with their agents, is not sufficiently close, quick, and delicate. Representatives ought to give light and leading to the people, just as the people give stimulus and momentum to their representatives. This incidental merit of the parliamentary system is among its greatest merits. But in America the action of the voter fails to tell upon Congress. He votes for a candidate of his own party, but he does not convey to that candidate an impulse towards the carrying of particular measures, because the candidate when in Congress will be practically unable to promote those measures, unless he happens to be placed on the committee to which they are referred. Hence the citizen, when he casts his ballot, can seldom feel that he is advancing any measure or policy, except the vague and general policy indicated in his party platform. He is voting for a party, but he does not know what the party will do, and for a man, but a man whom chance may deprive of the opportunity of advocating the measures he cares most for.

Conversely, Congress does not guide and illuminate its constituents. It is amorphous, and has little initiative. It does. not focus the light of the nation, does not warm its imagination, does not dramatize principles in the deeds and characters of men.1 This happens because, in ordinary times, it lacks great leaders,

1 As an illustration of the want of the dramatic element in Congress, I may mention that some at least of the parliamentary debating societies in the American colleges (colleges for women included) take for their model not either House of Congress but the British House of Commons, the students conducting their debates under the names of prominent members of that assembly. They say that they do this because Congress has no Ministry and no leaders of the Opposition.

and the most obvious cause why it lacks them, is its disconnection from the executive. As it is often devoid of such men, so neither does the country habitually come to it to look for them. In the old days, neither Hamilton, nor Jefferson, nor John Adams, in our own time, neither Stanton, nor Grant, nor Tilden, nor Cleveland, ever sat in Congress. Lincoln sat for two years only, and owed little of his subsequent eminence to his career there.

VIII. The independence of the judiciary, due to its holding for life, has been a conspicuous merit of the Federal system, as compared with the popular election and short terms of judges in most of the States. Yet even the Federal judiciary is not secure from the attacks of the two other powers, if combined. For the legislature may by statute increase the number of Federal justices, increase it to any extent,, since the Constitution leaves the number undetermined, and the President may appoint persons whom he knows to be actuated by a particular political bias, perhaps even prepared to decide specific questions in a particular sense. Thus he and Congress together may, if not afraid of popular displeasure, obtain such a judicial determination of any constitutional question as they join in desiring, even although that question has been heretofore differently decided by the Supreme court. The only safeguard is in the disapproval of the

people.

It is worth remarking that the points in which the American frame of national government has proved least successful are those which are most distinctly artificial, i.e. those which are not the natural outgrowth of old institutions and well-formed habits, but devices consciously introduced to attain specific ends.1 The

1 See Chapter IV. ante, and Note thereto, in which it is shown that most of the provisions of the Federal Constitution which have worked well were drawn from the Constitutions of the several States.

This may seem to be another way of saying that nature, i.e. historical develop. ment, is wiser than the wisest men. Yet it must be remembered that what we call historical development is really the result of a great many small expedients invented by men during many generations for curing the particular evils in their government which from time to time had to be cured. The moral therefore is that a succession of small improvements, each made conformably to existing conditions and habits, is more likely to succeed than a large scheme, made all at once in what may be called the spirit of conscious experiment. The Federal Constitution has been generally supposed in Europe to have been such a scheme, and its success has encouraged other countries to attempt similar bold and large experiments. This is an error. The Constitution of the United States is almost as truly the matured result of long and gradual historical development as the English Constitution itself.

election of the President and Vice-President by electors appointed ad hoc is such a device. The functions of the judiciary do not belong to this category; they are the natural outgrowth of common law doctrines and of the previous history of the colonies and States; all that is novel in them, for it can hardly be called artificial, is the creation of Courts co-extensive with the sphere of the national government.

All the main features of American government may be deduced from two principles. One is the sovereignty of the people, which expresses itself in the fact that the supreme law-the Constitution-is the direct utterance of their will, that they alone can amend it, that it prevails against every other law, that whatever powers it does not delegate are deemed to be reserved to it, that every power in the State draws its authority, whether directly, like the House of Representatives, or in the second degree, like the President and the Senate, or in the third degree, like the Federal judiciary, from the people, and is legally re sponsible to the people, and not to any one of the other powers.

The second principle, itself a consequence of this first one, is the distrust of the various organs and agents of government. The States are carefully safeguarded against aggression by the central government. So are the individual citizens. Each organ of government, the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, is made a jealous observer and restrainer of the others. Since the people, being too numerous, cannot directly manage their affairs, but must commit them to agents, they have resolved to prevent abuses by trusting each agent as little as possible, and subjecting him to the oversight of other agents, who will harass and check him if he attempts to overstep his instructions.

Some one has said that the American Government and Constitution are b d on the theology of Calvin and the philosophy of Hobbes. This at least is true, that there is a hearty Puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. It is the work of men who believed in original sin, and were resolved to leave open for transgressors no door which they could possibly shut. Compare this spirit with the enthusiastic optimism of the Frenchmen of 1789. It is not merely a difference of race temperaments; it is a difference of fundamental ideas.

With the spirit of Puritanism there is blent a double portion 1 "That power might be abused," says Marshall in his Life of Washington, was deemed a conclusive reason why it should not be conferred."

of the spirit of legalism. Not only is there no reliance on ethical forces to help the government to work: there is an elaborate machinery of law to preserve the equilibrium of each of its organs. The aim of the Constitution seems to be not so much to attain great common ends by securing a good government as to avert the evils which will flow, not merely from a bad government, but from any government strong enough to threaten the pre-existing communities or the individual citizen.

The spirit of 1787 was an English spirit, and therefore a conservative spirit, tinged, no doubt, by the hatred to tyranny developed in the revolutionary struggle, tinged also by the nascent dislike to inequality, but in the main an English spirit, which desired to walk in the old paths of precedent, which thought of government as a means of maintaining order and securing to every one his rights, rather than as a great ideal power, capable of guiding and developing a nation's life. And thus, though the Constitution of 1789 represented a great advance on the still oligarchic system of contemporary England, it was yet, if we regard simply its legal provisions, the least democratic of democracies. Had the points which it left undetermined been dealt with in an aristocratic spirit, had the legislation of Congress and of the several States taken an aristocratic turn, it might have grown into an aristocratic system.1 The democratic character which it now possesses is largely the result of subsequent events, which have changed the conditions under which it had to work, and have delivered its development into the hands of that passion for equality which has become a powerful factor in the modern world everywhere.

He who should desire to draw an indictment against the American scheme of government might make it a long one, and might for every count in it cite high American authority and adduce evidence from American history. Yet a European reader would greatly err were he to conclude that this scheme of government is a failure, or is, indeed, for the purposes of the country, inferior to the political system of any of the great nations of the Old World.

All governments are faulty; and an equally minute analysis of the constitutions of England, or France, or Germany would

The point most vital for determining the character of Congress, viz. the qualification of the electors, was left to the States. They have determined it by establishing manhood suffrage

disclose mischiefs as serious, relatively to the problems with which those states have to deal, as those we have noted in the American system. To any one familiar with the practical working of free governments it is a standing wonder that they work at all. The first impulse of mankind is to follow and obey; servitude rather than freedom is their natural state. With freedom, when it emerges among the more progressive races, there come dissension and faction; and it takes many centuries to form those habits of compromise, that love of order, and that respect for public opinion which make democracy tolerable. What keeps a free government going is the good sense and patriotism of the people, or of the guiding class, embodied in usages and traditions which it is hard to describe, but which find, in moments of difficulty, remedies for the inevitable faults of the system. Now, this good sense and that power of subordinating sectional to national interests which we call patriotism, exist in higher measure in America than in any of the great states of Europe. And the United States, more than any other country, are governed by public opinion, that is to say, by the general sentiment of the mass of the nation, which all the organs of the national government and of the State governments look to and obey.1

A philosopher from Jupiter or Saturn who should examine the constitution of England or that of America would probably pronounce that such a body of complicated devices, full of opportunities for conflict and deadlock, could not work at all. Many of those who examined the American constitution when it was launched did point to a multitude of difficulties, and confidently predicted its failure. Still more confidently did the European enemies of free government declare in the crisis of the War of Secession that "the republican bubble had burst." Some of these censures were well grounded, though there were also defects which had escaped criticism, and were first disclosed by experience. But the Constitution has lived on in spite of all defects, and seems stronger now than at any previous epoch.

Every Constitution, like every man, has "the defects of its good qualities." If a nation desires perfect stability it must put up with a certain slowness and cumbrousness; it must face the possibility of a want of action where action is called for. If, on the other hand, it seeks to obtain executive speed and vigour by 1 The nature of public opinion and the way in which it governs are discussed in Part IV.