expensive to the public, obstructing the public business, and promoting factions among the people, many tempers naturally adhering obstinately to measures they have once publicly adopted? Have we not seen, in one of our neighboring States, a bad measure, adopted by one branch of the legislature, for want of the assistance of some more intelligent members who had been packed into the other, occasion many debates, con'ducted with much asperity, which could not be settled but by an expensive general appeal to the public? And have we not seen, in another neighboring State, a similar difference between the two branches, occasioning long debates and contentions, whereby the State was prevented for many months enjoying the advantage of having Senators in the Congress of the United States? And has our present legislature in one Assembly committed any errors of importance, which they have not remedied or may not easily remedy; more easily, probably, than if divided into two branches? And if the wisdom brought by the members to the Assembly is divided into two branches, may it not be too weak in each to support a good measure, or obstruct a bad one? The division of the legislature into two or three branches in England, was it the product of wisdom, or the effect of necessity, arising from the pre-existing prevalence of an odious feudal system? which government, notwithstanding this division, is now become, in fact, an absolute monarchy, since the . . . by bribing the representatives with the people's money, carries, by his ministers, all the measures that please him; which is equivalent to governing without a parliament, and renders the machine of government much more complex and expensive, and, from its being more complex, more easily put out of order. Has not the famous political fable of the snake, with two heads and one body, some useful instruction contained in it? She was going to a brook to drink, and in her way was to pass through a hedge, a twig of which opposed her direct course; one head chose to go on the right side of the twig, and the other on the left; so that time was spent in the contest, and, before the decision was completed, the poor snake died with thirst." 1 Franklin argued in vain. The following year saw Pennsylvania fall into line with a Senate. So ended one of the battles royal in the long political fight between the conservatives of 1 Works of Benjamin Franklin (John Bigelow ed.), x, 185-88. the State, led by James Wilson, and those who under the leadership of George Bryan stood for democratic extremes. The defenders of popular liberty mourned the loss of a precious bulwark that when embodied in the Constitution had been gloried in and boasted of as a settled, established fact, for three quarters of a century,1 and that seemed to them since then to have continued in justifying itself. James Wilson more wisely interpreted the lessons of experience and saw things more clearly when he told the Pennsylvania Convention for ratifying the Federal Constitution, December 1, 1787: "Though two bodies may not possess more wisdom or patriotism than what may be found in a single body, yet they will necessarily introduce a greater degree of precision. An indigested and inaccurate code of laws is one of the most dangerous things that can be introduced into any government. The force of this observation is well known by every gentleman who has attended to the laws of this State. This, sir, is a very important advantage that will arise from this division of the legislative authority."2 Another powerful thinker, James Iredell, had said to the North Carolina Convention, July 25, 1788: "It will often happen that, in a single body, a bare majority will carry exceptionable and pernicious measures. The violent faction of a party may often form such a majority in a single body, and by that means the particular views or interests of a part of the community may be consulted, and those of the rest neglected or injured. Is there a single gentleman in this Convention, who has been a member of the Legislature, who has not found the minority in the most important questions to be often right? Is there a man here, who has been in either House, who has not at some times found the most solid advantages from the coöperation or opposition of the other? If a measure be right, which has been approved by one branch, the other will probably confirm it; if it be wrong, it is fortunate that there is another branch to oppose or amend it.”3 Notice that Iredell too was appealing to experience, the most convincing of teachers. Let it not be thought that the men who framed our Constitutions built them on the basis of a priori reasoning. They knew what had happened and they learned 1 B. A. Konkle, George Bryan and the Const. of Pa., 118. 3 Ibid., IV, 39. from what they had observed. Take another illustration, that of the opening speech of Charles Pinckney in the South Carolina Convention. "In Maryland," he said, "one branch of their legislature is a Senate, chosen, for five years, by electors chosen by the people. The knowledge and firmness which this body have, upon all occasions, displayed, not only in the exercise of their legislative duties, but in withstanding and defeating such of the projects of the other House as appeared to them founded in personal and local motives, have long since convinced me that the Senate of Maryland is the best model of a Senate that has yet been offered to the Union."1 The authors of "The Federalist," in their all-inclusive defense of the proposed Constitution, of course justified the creation of a Senate. In Nos. 62 and 63 they reviewed what they described as the inconveniences which a republic must suffer from the want of such an institution as the Senate. "It doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy, where the ambition or corruption of one would otherwise be sufficient. The necessity of a Senate is not less indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions. Another defect to be supplied by a Senate lies in a want of due acquaintance with the objects and principles of legislation. The mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members, however qualified they may be, points out, in the strongest manner, the necessity of some stable institution in the government." It is to be remembered that at this time there had been a dozen years of experience with the weakness and inefficiency of a Confederation governed by a single-chamber Congress. When the Articles of Confederation were drawn, the Committee had rejected the suggestion of an annual Parliament of two Houses. As Bancroft says, misled partly by the rooted distrust for which the motive had ceased, and partly by erudition which studied Hellenic councils and leagues as well as later confederacies, it took for its pattern the constitution of the United Provinces, with one House and no central power of final decision." One of the dangers feared by the framers of the new Constitu1 Elliot's Debates, IV, 324. 2 Formation of the Constitution, 11. tion was that, however unfortunate this feature of the Confederation might seem to thoughtful men, it was so much approved by the masses that they might refuse a change. Indeed, one of the grievances of the insurgents who instigated Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts was the existence of the State Senate. Elbridge Gerry observed in the Federal Convention, June 5, 1787, that in the Eastern States the people "have at this time the wildest ideas of government in the world. They were for abolishing the Senate in Massachusetts, and giving all the other powers of government to the other branch of the Legislature." 1 This brief revelation of Gerry's temper in the matter is the more significant by reason of the fact that Gerry was by nature what we should now call a Democrat. He refused to sign the new Constitution because the rights of the citizen were not rendered secure. In spite of the mass of evidence and argument, some American radicals persisted in doubts. For instance, William Maclay, the virulent and ever-suspicious Senator from Pennsylvania, wrote in his Journal May 25, 1789: "When I came home in the evening I told Mr. Wynkoop [a Representative from the same State] the business of the day. He said things of this kind made him think whether our style of government in Pennsylvania was not the best. Certain it is that a government with so many branches affords a larger field for caballing; first in the Lower House, and the moment a party finds a measure lost or likely to be lost, all engines are set to work in the Upper House. If they are likely to fail here, the last attempt is made with the President, and, as most pains are always taken by bad men and to support bad measures, the calculation seems in favor of the exertions and endeavors that are used, more than in the justness of the measure. On the other hand, a fuller field is open for investigation, but, unfortunately, intrigue and cabal take place of a fair inquiry." The Journal of the Convention that framed the Constitution of Tennessee in 1796 shows that Andrew Jackson seconded a motion leading to a vote whereby the Convention at first decided in favor of one House. It changed its mind, however, and fell in with the tendency of the times. Of our three States that began with a single chamber, Georgia had reached two Houses in 1789, Pennsylvania in 1790. In the third, Vermont, which 1 Elliot's Debates, v, 158. had taken her Constitution chiefly from Pennsylvania, the Council of Censors recommended a Senate in 1793 and again in 1813. The proposal in 1813 was rejected in the House by a vote of 5 to 195. A like proposal in 1827 was defeated by 47 to 182. Gain for it continued until 1836, when it prevailed. EXPERIENCE ABROAD EUROPEAN experience with single chambers has not encouraged the spread of that system abroad. The Italian Republics of the Middle Ages notably taught the danger. John Adams showed that no part of the political history of mankind is more full of instructive lessons on the subject, or contains more striking proofs of the factious instability and turbulent misery of States under the domain of a single unchecked legislature, than the story of those Republics. (Adams in his remarkable "Defense of the American Constitution" not the Federal Constitution, for it had not been drawn, but the State systems of government was answering the criticisms of Turgot and de Mably on the two-chamber idea that the American States had put into their Constitutions.) In February of 1649 the House of Commons resolved by 44 to 29 that "the House of Peers is useless and dangerous, and ought to be abolished." For four years the House of Commons ruled without check or veto. It was impulsive, arbitrary, tyrannical. Cromwell passed stern judgment on it. "As for Members of Parliament," he declared, "their pride and ambition and self-seeking, ingrossing all places of honor and profit to themselves and their friends, and their daily breaking forth into new and violent parties and factions; their delay of business and design to perpetuate themselves, and to continue the power in their own hands; their meddling in private matters between party and party, contrary to the institution of Parliament, and their injustice and partiality in those matters, and the scandalous lives of some of the chief of them; these things, my lord, do give much ground for the people to open their mouths against them and to dislike them, nor can they be kept within the bounds of justice and law or reason, they themselves being the supreme power of the nation, liable to no account, nor to be controlled or regulated by any other power; there being none superior or coördinate with them." So at last he put an end to what he called their prating. |