Part 4 (2/2)

It cannot, therefore, be reasonably regarded as matter of surprise that our financial policy has been without consistency or coherency, without progressive continuity. The only evidences of design to be discovered in it appear in those few elementary features which were impressed upon it in the first days of the government, when Congress depended upon such men as Hamilton and Gallatin for guidance in putting the finances into shape. As far as it has any invariable characteristics, or any traceable heredity, it is the handiwork of the sagacious men who first presided over the Treasury department. Since it has been altogether in the hands of congressional Committees it has so waywardly s.h.i.+fted from one role to another, and has with such erratic facility changed its principles of action and its modes of speech, to suit the temper and tastes of the times, that one who studies it hardly becomes acquainted with it in one decade before he finds that that was a season quite apart from and unlike both those which went before and those which succeeded. At almost every session Congress has made some effort, more or less determined, towards changing the revenue system in some essential portion; and that system has never escaped radical alteration for ten years together. Had revenue been graduated by the comparatively steady standard of the expenditures, it must have been kept stable and calculable; but depending, as it has done, on a much-debated and constantly fluctuating industrial policy, it has been regulated in accordance with a scheme which has pa.s.sed through as many phases as there have been vicissitudes and vagaries in the fortunes of commerce and the tactics of parties.

This is the more remarkable because upon all fiscal questions Congress acts with considerable deliberation and care. Financial legislation usually, if not always, occupies by far the most prominent place in the business of each session. Though other questions are often disposed of at odd moments, in haste and without thought, questions of revenue and supply are always given full measure of debate. The House of Representatives, under authority of the Rule before referred to, which enables it, as it were, to project the previous question into Committee of the Whole, by providing for the discharge of that Committee from the further consideration of any bill that is in its hands, or that may be about to be referred to it, after all amendments ”pending and that may be offered” shall have been acted upon without debate, seldom hesitates, when any ordinary business is to be considered, to forbid to the proceedings of Committee of the Whole all freedom of discussion, and, consequently, almost all discretion as to the action to be taken; but this muzzle is seldom put upon the mouth of the Committee when appropriation or tariff bills are to be considered, unless the discussion in Committee wanders off into fields, quite apart from the proper matter of the measure in hand, in which case the House interposes to check the irrelevant talk. Appropriation bills have, however, as I have shown, a much higher privilege than have bills affecting the tariff, and instances are not wanting in which the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations has managed to engross the time of the House in the disposal of measures prepared by his Committee, to the entire exclusion of any action whatever on important bills reported by the Committee of Ways and Means after the most careful and laborious deliberation. His prerogatives are never disputed in such a contest for consideration between a supply and a revenue bill, because these two subjects do not, under our system, necessarily go hand in hand. Ways and Means bills may and should be acted upon, but Supply bills must be.

It should be remarked in this connection, moreover, that much as Congress talks about fiscal questions, whenever permitted to do so by the selfish Appropriations Committee, its talk is very little heeded by the big world outside its halls. The noteworthy fact, to which I have already called attention, that even the most thorough debates in Congress fail to awaken any genuine or active interest in the minds of the people, has had its most striking ill.u.s.trations in the course of our financial legislation; for, though the discussions which have taken place in Congress upon financial questions have been so frequent, so protracted, and so thorough, engrossing so large a part of the time of the House on their every recurrence, they seem, in almost every instance, to have made scarcely any impression at all upon the public mind. The Coinage Act of 1873, by which silver was demonetized, had been before the country many years, ere it reached adoption, having been time and again considered by Committees of Congress, time and again printed and discussed in one shape or another, and having finally gained acceptance apparently by sheer persistence and importunity. The Resumption Act of 1875, too, had had a like career of repeated considerations by Committees, repeated printings, and a full discussion by Congress; and yet when the ”Bland Silver Bill” of 1878 was on its way through the mills of legislation, some of the most prominent newspapers of the country declared with confidence that the Resumption Act had been pa.s.sed inconsiderately and in haste, almost secretly indeed; and several members of Congress had previously complained that the demonetization scheme of 1873 had been pushed surrept.i.tiously through the courses of its pa.s.sage, Congress having been tricked into accepting it, doing it scarcely knew what.

This indifference of the country to what is said in Congress, pointing, as it obviously does, to the fact that, though the Committees lead in legislation, they lead without concert or responsibility, and lead n.o.body in particular, that is, no compact and organized party force which can be made accountable for its policy, has also a further significance with regard to the opportunities and capacities of the const.i.tuencies. The doubt and confusion of thought which must necessarily exist in the minds of the vast majority of voters as to the best way of exerting their will in influencing the action of an a.s.sembly whose organization is so complex, whose acts are apparently so haphazard, and in which responsibility is spread so thin, throws const.i.tuencies into the hands of local politicians who are more visible and tangible than are the leaders of Congress, and generates, the while, a profound distrust of Congress as a body whose actions cannot be reckoned beforehand by any standard of promises made at elections or any programmes announced by conventions. Const.i.tuencies can watch and understand a few banded leaders who display plain purposes and act upon them with promptness; but they cannot watch or understand forty odd Standing Committees, each of which goes its own way in doing what it can without any special regard to the pledges of either of the parties from which its members.h.i.+p is drawn. In short, we lack in our political life the conditions most essential for the formation of an active and effective public opinion. ”The characteristics of a nation capable of public opinion,” says Mr. Bagehot, most sagacious of political critics, ”is that ... parties will be _organized_; in each there will be a leader, in each there will be some looked up to, and many who look up to them; the opinion of the party will be formed and suggested by the few, it will be criticised and accepted by the many.”[34] And this is just the sort of party organization which we have not. Our parties have t.i.tular leaders at the polls in the persons of candidates, and nominal creeds in the resolutions of conventions, but no select few in whom to trust for guidance in the general policy of legislation, or to whom to look for suggestions of opinion. What man, what group of men, can speak for the Republican party or for the Democratic party? When our most conspicuous and influential politicians say anything about future legislation, no one supposes that they are speaking for their party, as those who have authority; they are known to speak only for themselves and their small immediate following of colleagues and friends.

The present relations between Congress and public opinion remind us of that time, in the reign of George III., when ”the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to control the course of English government,” when the government was divorced from ”that general ma.s.s of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground itself.” Then it was that English public opinion, ”robbed as it was of all practical power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the consciousness of power carries with it,” ”became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress of the age, but at the same time ...

hostile to Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from Parliament. For the first and last time ... Parliament was unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity.”[35] Congress has in our own day become divorced from the ”general ma.s.s of national sentiment,” simply because there is no means by which the movements of that national sentiment can readily be registered in legislation. Going about as it does to please all sorts of Committees composed of all sorts of men,--the dull and the acute, the able and the cunning, the honest and the careless,--Congress evades judgment by avoiding all coherency of plan in its action. The const.i.tuencies can hardly tell whether the works of any particular Congress have been good or bad; at the opening of its sessions there was no determinate policy to look forward to, and at their close no accomplished plans to look back upon. During its brief lifetime both parties may have vacillated and gone astray, policies may have s.h.i.+fted and wandered, and untold mischief, together with some good, may have been done; but when all is reviewed, it is next to impossible oftentimes to distribute justly the blame and the praise. A few stubborn committee-men may be at the bottom of much of the harm that has been wrought, but they do not represent their party, and it cannot be clear to the voter how his ballot is to change the habits of Congress for the better. He distrusts Congress because he feels that he cannot control it.

The voter, moreover, feels that his want of confidence in Congress is justified by what he hears of the power of corrupt lobbyists to turn legislation to their own uses. He hears of enormous subsidies begged and obtained; of pensions procured on commission by professional pension solicitors; of appropriations made in the interest of dishonest contractors; and he is not altogether unwarranted in the conclusion that these are evils inherent in the very nature of Congress, for there can be no doubt that the power of the lobbyist consists in great part, if not altogether, in the facility afforded him by the Committee system. He must, in the natural course of things, have many most favorable opportunities for approaching the great money-dispensing Committees. It would be impracticable to work up his schemes in the broad field of the whole House, but in the members.h.i.+p of a Committee he finds manageable numbers. If he can gain the ear of the Committee, or of any influential portion of it, he has practically gained the ear of the House itself; if his plans once get footing in a committee report, they may escape criticism altogether, and it will, in any case, be very difficult to dislodge them. This accessibility of the Committees by outsiders gives to illegitimate influences easy approach at all points of legislation, but no Committees are affected by it so often or so unfortunately as are the Committees which control the public moneys. They are naturally the ones whose favor is oftenest and most importunately, as well as most insidiously, sought; and no description of our system of revenue, appropriation, and supply would be complete without mention of the manufacturers who cultivate the favor of the Committee of Ways and Means, of the interested persons who walk attendance upon the Committee on Rivers and Harbors, and of the mail-contractors and subsidy-seekers who court the Committee on Appropriations.

My last point of critical comment upon our system of financial administration I shall borrow from a perspicacious critic of congressional methods who recently wrote thus to one of the best of American journals: ”So long as the debit side of the national account is managed by one set of men, and the credit side by another set, both sets working separately and in secret, without any public responsibility, and without any intervention on the part of the executive official who is nominally responsible; so long as these sets, being composed largely of new men every two years, give no attention to business except when Congress is in session, _and thus spend in preparing plans the whole time which ought to be spent in public discussion of plans already matured_, so that an immense budget is rushed through without discussion in a week or ten days,--just so long the finances will go from bad to worse, no matter by what name you call the party in power. No other nation on earth attempts such a thing, or could attempt it without soon coming to grief, our salvation thus far consisting in an enormous income, with practically no drain for military expenditure.”[36]

Unquestionably this strikes a very vital point of criticism. Congress spends its time working, in sections, at preparing plans, instead of confining itself to what is for a numerous a.s.sembly manifestly the much more useful and proper function of debating and revising plans prepared beforehand for its consideration by a commission of skilled men, old in political practice and in legislative habit, whose official life is apart from its own, though dependent upon its will. Here, in other words, is another finger pointing to Mr. Mill's question as to the best ”legislative commission.” Our Committees fall short of being the best form of commission, not only in being too numerous but also in being integral parts of the body which they lead, having no life apart from it. Probably the best working commission would be one which should make plans for government independently of the representative body, and in immediate contact with the practical affairs of administration, but which should in all cases look to that body for the sanctioning of those plans, and should be immediately responsible to it for their success when put into operation.

IV.

THE SENATE.

This is a Senate, a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators. This is a hall for mutual consultation and discussion, not an arena for the exhibition of champions.--DANIEL WEBSTER.

The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics. In the eyes of some it has a stateliness of character, an eminency of prerogative, and, for the most part, a wisdom of practice such as no other deliberative body possesses; whilst in the estimation of others it is now, whatever it may have been formerly, but a somewhat select company of leisurely ”bosses,” in whose companions.h.i.+p the few men of character and high purpose who gain admission to its members.h.i.+p find little that is encouraging and nothing that is congenial. Now of course neither of these extreme opinions so much as resembles the uncolored truth, nor can that truth be obtained by a judicious mixture of their milder ingredients. The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical.

The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it. Its members are chosen from the ranks of active politicians, in accordance with a law of natural selection to which the state legislatures are commonly obedient; and it is probable that it contains, consequently, the best men that our system calls into politics. If these best men are not good, it is because our system of government fails to attract better men by its prizes, not because the country affords or could afford no finer material.

It has been usual to suppose that the Senate was just what the Const.i.tution intended it to be; that because its place in the federal system was exalted the aims and character of its members would naturally be found to be exalted as well; that because its term was long its foresight would be long also; or that because its election was not directly of the people demagogy would find no life possible in its halls. But the Senate is in fact, of course, nothing more than a part, though a considerable part, of the public service, and if the general conditions of that service be such as to starve statesmen and foster demagogues, the Senate itself will be full of the latter kind, simply because there are no others available. There cannot be a separate breed of public men reared specially for the Senate. It must be recruited from the lower branches of the representative system, of which it is only the topmost part. No stream can be purer than its sources. The Senate can have in it no better men than the best men of the House of Representatives; and if the House of Representatives attract to itself only inferior talent, the Senate must put up with the same sort. I think it safe to say, therefore, that, though it may not be as good as could be wished, the Senate is as good as it can be under the circ.u.mstances.

It contains the most perfect product of our politics, whatever that product may be.

In order to understand and appreciate the Senate, therefore, one must know the conditions of public life in this country. What are those conditions? Well, in the first place, they are not what they were in the early years of the federal government; they are not what they were even twenty years ago; for in this, as in other things, the war between the States ends one distinct period and opens another. Between the great constructive statesmen of the revolutionary days and the reconstructing politicians of the sixties there came into public place and legislative influence a great race of const.i.tutional lawyers. The questions which faced our statesmen while the Const.i.tution was a-making were in the broadest sense questions of politics; but the questions which dominated our public life after the federal government had been successfully set up were questions of legal interpretation such as only lawyers could grapple with. All matters of policy, all doubts of legislation, even all difficulties of diplomacy, were measured by rules of const.i.tutional construction. There was hardly a single affair of public concern which was not hung upon some peg of const.i.tutional dogma in the testing-rooms of one or another of the contending schools of const.i.tutional interpretation. Const.i.tutional issues were ever the tides, questions of administrative policy seldom more than the eddies, of politics.

The Republicans under Jefferson drew their nourishment from const.i.tutional belief no less than did the Federalists; the Whigs and Democrats of a later day lived on what was essentially the same diet, though it was served in slightly different forms; and the parties of to-day are themselves fain to go to these cooks of the olden time whenever they desire strong meat to fortify them against their present debility. The great questions attending the admission of new States to the Union and the annexation of foreign territory, as well as all the controversies which came in the train of the contest over slavery and the reserved powers of the States, were of the Const.i.tution const.i.tutional; and what other questions were then living--save those which found root in the great charter's implied powers, about which there was such constant noise of debate? It will be remembered that very few publicists opposed internal improvements, for instance, on the ground that they were unwise or uncalled for. No one who took a statesman-like view of the matter could fail to see that the opening up of the great water-ways of the country, the construction of roads, the cutting of ca.n.a.ls, or any public work which might facilitate inter-State commerce by making intercourse between the various portions of the Union easy and rapid, was sanctioned by every consideration of wisdom, as being in conformity with a policy at once national in its spirit and universal in its benefits. The doubt was, not as to what it would be best and most provident to do, but as to what it would be lawful to do; and the chief opponents of schemes of internal improvement based their dissent upon a careful meditation of the language of the Const.i.tution.

Without its plain approval they would not move, even if they had to stand still all their days.

It was, too, with many professions of this spirit that the tariff was dealt with. It ran suddenly to the front as a militant party question in 1833, not as if a great free-trade movement had been set afoot which was to antic.i.p.ate the mission of Cobden and Bright, but as an issue between federal taxation and the const.i.tutional privileges of the States. The agricultural States were being, as they thought, very cruelly trodden down under the iron heel of that protectionist policy to whose enthronement they had themselves consented, and they fetched their hope of escape from the Const.i.tution. The federal government unquestionably possessed, they admitted, and that by direct grant of the fundamental law, the right to impose duties on imports; but did that right carry with it the privilege of laying discriminating duties for other purposes than that of raising legitimate revenue? Could the Const.i.tution have meant that South Carolina might be taxed to maintain the manufactures of New England?

Close upon the heels of the great tariff controversy of that time came the stupendous contest over the right of secession and the abolition of slavery; and again in this contest, as in all that had gone before, the party which was being hard driven sought refuge in the Const.i.tution.

This too was, in its first stages at least, a lawyer's question. It eventually slipped out of all lawyerly control, and was given over to be settled by the stern and savage processes of war; but it stayed with the const.i.tutional lawyers as long as it could, and would have stayed with them to the end had it not itself been bigger than the Const.i.tution and mixed with such interests and such pa.s.sions as were beyond the control of legislatures or of law courts.

Such samples of the character which political questions have hitherto borne in this country are sufficient to remind all readers of our history of what have been the chief features of our politics, and may serve, without further elaboration, to ill.u.s.trate the point I wish to emphasize. It is manifest how such a course of politics would affect statesmans.h.i.+p and political leaders.h.i.+p. While questions affecting the proper construction of the Const.i.tution were the chief and most imperative questions pressing for settlement, great lawyers were in demand; and great lawyers were, accordingly, forthcoming in satisfaction of the demand. In a land like ours, where litigation is facilitated by the establishment of many open and impartial courts, great lawyers are a much more plentiful product than great administrators, unless there be also some extraordinary means for the encouragement of administrative talents. We have, accordingly, always had plenty of excellent lawyers, though we have often had to do without even tolerable administrators, and seem destined to endure the inconvenience of hereafter doing without any constructive statesmen at all. The const.i.tutional issues of former times were so big and so urgent that they brought great advocates into the field, despite all the tendencies there were in our system towards depriving leaders.h.i.+p of all place of authority. In the presence of questions affecting the very structure and powers of the federal government, parties had to rally with definite purpose and espouse a distinct creed; and when the maintenance or overthrow of slavery had ceased to be a question of const.i.tutional right, and had become a matter of contention between sentiment and vested rights,--between interest and pa.s.sionate feeling,--there was of course a hot energy of contest between two compact hosts and a quick elevation of forceful leaders.

The three stages of national growth which preceded the war between the States were each of them creative of a distinct cla.s.s of political leaders. In the period of erection there were great architects and master-builders; in the period of const.i.tutional interpretation there were, at a distance from the people, great political schoolmen who pondered and expounded the letter of the law, and, nearer the people, great const.i.tutional advocates who cast the doctrines of the schoolmen into policy; and in the period of abolitionist agitation there were great masters of feeling and leaders of public purpose. The publicists of the second period kept charge of the slavery question, as I have said, as long as they could, and gave place with bitter reluctance to the anti-slavery orators and pro-slavery champions who were to talk the war-feeling into a flame. But it was of course inevitable that the new movement should have new leaders. It was essentially revolutionary in its tone and in its designs, and so quite out of the reach of those principles of action which had governed the policy of the older school of politicians. Its aim was to change, not to vindicate, the Const.i.tution. Its leaders spoke, not words of counsel, but words of pa.s.sion and of command. It was a crusade, not a campaign; the impetuous movement of a cause, not the canva.s.s of a mooted measure. And, like every big, stirring cause, it had its leaders--leaders whose authority rested upon the affections and sympathies of the people rather than upon any attested wisdom or success of statesmans.h.i.+p. The war was the work, mediately, of philanthropists; and the reconstructions which followed the war were the hasty strokes of these same unbalanced knights of the crusade, full of bold feeling, but not of steady or far-sighted judgment.

The anti-slavery movement called forth leaders who, from the very nature of their calling, were more picturesque than any who had figured on the national stage since the notable play of the Revolution had gone off the boards; but it was no better cast in leading parts than had been the drama which immediately preceded it. When the const.i.tution of a self-governing people is being consciously moulded by the rapid formation of precedent during the earliest periods of its existence, there are sure to be antagonistic beliefs, distinct and strong and active enough to take shape in the creeds of energetic parties, each led by the greatest advocates of its cherished principles. The season of our const.i.tutional development, consequently, saw as fine a race of statesmen at the front of national affairs as have ever directed the civil policy of the country; and they, in turn, gave place to men brave to encounter the struggles of changed times, and fit to solve the doubts of a new set of events.

Since the war, however, we have come into a fourth period of national life, and are perplexed at finding ourselves denied a new order of statesmans.h.i.+p to suit the altered conditions of government. The period of federal construction is long-pa.s.sed; questions of const.i.tutional interpretation are no longer regarded as of pressing urgency, the war has been fought, even the embers of its issues being now almost extinguished; and we are left to that unexciting but none the less capitally important business of every-day peaceful development and judicious administration to whose execution every nation in its middle age has to address itself with what sagacity, energy, and prudence it can command. It cannot be said that these new duties have as yet raised up any men eminently fit for their fulfillment. We have had no great administrators since the opening of this newest stage, and there is as yet no visible sign that any such will soon arise. The forms of government in this country have always been unfavorable to the easy elevation of talent to a station of paramount authority; and those forms in their present crystallization are more unfavorable than ever to the toleration of the leaders.h.i.+p of the few, whilst the questions now most prominent in politics are not of such a nature as to compel skilled and trustworthy champions to come into the field, as did the const.i.tutional issues and revolutionary agitations of other days. They are matters of a too quiet, business-like sort to enlist feeling or arouse enthusiasm.

It is, therefore, very unfortunate that only feeling or enthusiasm can create recognized leaders.h.i.+p in our politics. There is no office set apart for the great party leader in our government. The powers of the Speakers.h.i.+p of the House of Representatives are too cramped and covert; the privileges of the chairmans.h.i.+ps of the chief Standing Committees are too limited in scope; the presidency is too silent and inactive, too little like a premiers.h.i.+p and too much like a superintendency. If there be any one man to whom a whole party or a great national majority looks for guiding counsel, he must lead without office, as Daniel Webster did, or in spite of his office, as Jefferson and Jackson did. There must be something in the times or in the questions which are abroad to thrust great advocates or great masters of purpose into a non-official leaders.h.i.+p, which is theirs because they represent in the greatest actions of their lives some principle at once vital and widely loved or hated, or because they possess in their unrivaled power of eloquent speech the ability to give voice to some such living theme. There must be a cause to be advanced which is greater than the trammels of governmental forms, and which, by authority of its own imperative voice, const.i.tutes its advocates the leaders of the nation, though without giving them official t.i.tle--without need of official t.i.tle. No one is authorized to lead by reason of any official station known to our system. We call our real leaders by no names but their own: Mr. Webster was always Mr. Webster and never Prime Minister.

In a country which governs itself by means of a public meeting, a Congress or a Parliament, a country whose political life is representative, the only real leaders.h.i.+p in governmental affairs must be legislative leaders.h.i.+p--ascendency in the public meeting which decides everything. The leaders, if there be any, must be those who suggest the opinions and rule the actions of the representative body. We have in this country, therefore, no real leaders.h.i.+p; because no man is allowed to direct the course of Congress, and there is no way of governing the country save through Congress, which is supreme. The chairman of a great Committee like the Committee of Ways and Means stands, indeed, at the sources of a very large and important stream of policy, and can turn that stream at his pleasure, or mix what he will with its waters; but there are whole provinces of policy in which he can have no authority at all. He neither directs, nor can often influence, those other chairmen who direct all the other important affairs of government. He, though the greatest of chairmen, and as great, it may be, as any other one man in the whole governmental system, is by no means at the head of the government. He is, as he feels every day, only a big wheel where there are many other wheels, some almost as big as he, and all driven, like himself, by fires which he does not kindle or tend.

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