The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce
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marked; the individuals vary little from the type. In Europe all sorts of persons are sucked into the vortex of the legislature—nobles and landowners, lawyers, physicians, businessmen, artisans, journalists, men of learning, men of science. In America five representatives out of six are politicians pure and simple, members of a class as well defined as anyone of the above-mentioned European classes. The American people, though it is composed of immigrants from every country and occupies a whole continent, tends to become more uniform than most of the great European peoples; and this characteristic is palpable in its legislature.
Uneasy lies the head of an ambitious congressman,3 for the chances are almost even that he will lose his seat at the next election. It was observed in 1788 that half of the members of each successive state legislature were new members, and this average was long maintained in the federal legislature, rather less than half keeping their seats from one Congress to the next. In recent years reelection has grown more frequent, and in the Sixty-first Congress (1909–11), only 74 members out of 391 had not served before. Sixteen members had served during nine or more previous terms, i.e., for eighteen years or more. In England the proportion of members reelected from Parliament to Parliament has been higher. Anyone can see how much influence this constant change in the composition of the American House must have upon its legislative efficiency.
I have kept to the last the feature of the House which an Englishman finds the strangest.
It has parties, but they are headless. There is neither government nor opposition. There can hardly be said to be leaders, and till 1900 there were no whips.4 No person holding any federal office or receiving any federal salary can be a member of it. That the majority may be and often is opposed to the president and his cabinet, does not strike Americans as odd, because they proceed on the theory that the legislative ought to be distinct from the executive authority. Since no minister sits, there is no official representative of the administration. Neither is there any permanent unofficial representative. And as there are no members whose opinions expressed in debate are followed, so there are none whose duty it is to be always on the spot to look after members to vote, secure a quorum, and tell their friends which way the bulk of the party is going.
So far as the majority has a chief, that chief is the Speaker, often chosen by them as their ablest and most influential man; but as the Speaker seldom joins in debate (though he may do so by leaving the chair, having put someone else in it), the chairman of the most important committee, that of Ways and Means, enjoys a sort of eminence, and comes nearer than anyone else to the position of leader of the House.5 But his authority does not always enable him to secure cooperation for debate among the best speakers of his party, putting up now one now another, after the fashion of an English prime minister, and thereby guiding the general course of the discussion.
The minority need not formally choose a chief, nor is there usually anyone among them whose career marks him out as practically the first man, but there is generally someone who is regarded as leading, and the person whom they have put forward as their party candidate for the Speakership, giving him what is called “the complimentary nomination,” has a sort of vague claim to be so regarded. This honour carries little real authority. On one occasion the Speaker of the last preceding Congress, who had received such a complimentary nomination from his party against the candidate whom the majority elected, found immediately afterwards that so far from treating him as leader, they left him, on some motion which he made, in a ridiculously small minority. Of course when an exciting question comes up, some man of marked capacity and special knowledge will often become virtually leader, in either party, for the purposes of the debates upon it. But he will not necessarily command the votes of his own side.
How then does the House work?
If it were a chamber, like those of France or Germany, divided into four or five sections of opinion, none of which commands a steady majority, it would not work at all. But parties are few in the United States, and their cohesion tight. There are usually two only, so nearly equal in strength that the majority cannot afford to dissolve into groups like those of France. Hence upon all large national issues, whereon the general sentiment of the party has been declared, both the majority and the minority know how to vote, and vote solid, though upon minor issues much latitude is allowed.
If the House were, like the English House of Commons, to some extent an executive as well as a legislative body—one by whose cooperation and support the daily business of government had to be carried on—it could not work without leaders and whips. This it is not. It neither creates, nor controls, nor destroys, the administration, which depends on the president, himself the offspring of a direct popular mandate.
“Still,” it may be replied, “the House has important functions to discharge. Legislation comes from it. Supply depends on it. It settles the tariff, and votes money for the civil and military services, besides passing measures to cure the defects which experience must disclose in the working of every government, every system of jurisprudence. How can it satisfy these calls upon it without leaders and organization?”
To a European eye, it does not seem to satisfy them. It votes the necessary supplies, but not wisely, giving sometimes too much, sometimes too little money, and taking no adequate securities for the due application of the sums voted. For many years it fumbled over both the tariff problem and the currency problem. It produces few useful laws, and leaves on one side many grave practical questions. An Englishman is disposed to ascribe these failures to the fact that as there are no leaders, there is no one responsible for the neglect of business, the miscarriage of bills, the unwise appropriation of public funds. “In England,” he says, “the ministry of the day bears the blame of whatever goes wrong in the House of Commons. Having a majority, it ought to be able to do what it desires. If it pleads that its measures have been obstructed, and that it cannot under the faulty procedure of the House of Commons accomplish what it seeks, it is met, and crushed, by the retort that in such case it ought to have the procedure changed. What else is its majority good for but to secure the efficiency of Parliament? In America there is no person against whom similar charges can be brought. Although conspicuous folly or perversity on the part of the majority tends to discredit them collectively with the public, and may damage them at the next presidential or congressional election, still, responsibility, to be effective, ought to be fixed on a few conspicuous leaders. Is not the want of such men, men to whom the country can look, and whom the ordinary members will follow, the cause of some of the faults which are charged on Congress, of its hesitations, its inconsistencies and changes, its ignoble surrenders to some petty clique, its deficient sense of dignity, its shrinking from troublesome questions, its proclivity to jobs?”
Two American statesmen to whom such a criticism was submitted, replied as follows: “It is not for want of leaders that Congress has forborne to settle the questions mentioned, but because the division of opinion in the country regarding them has been faithfully reflected in Congress. The majority has not been strong enough to get its way; and this has happened, not only because abundant opportunities for resistance arise from the methods of doing business, but still more because no distinct impulse or mandate towards any particular settlement of these questions has been received from the country. It is not for Congress to go faster than the people. When the country knows and speaks its mind, Congress will not fail to act.” The significance of this reply lies in its pointing to a fundamental difference between the conception of the respective positions and duties of a representative body and of the nation at large entertained by Americans, and the conception which has hitherto prevailed in Europe. Europeans have thought of a legislature as belonging to the governing class. In America there is no such class. Europeans think that the legislature ought to consist of the best men in the country, Americans that it should be a fair average sample of the country. Europeans think that it ought to lead the nation, Americans that it ought to follow the nation.
Without some sort of organization, an assembly of three hundred and thirty men would be a mob, so necessity has provided in the system of committees a substitute for the European party organization. This system of committees will be explained in the next chapter; for the present it is enough to observe that when a matter which has been (as all bills are) referred to a committee, comes up in the House to be dealt with there, the chairman of the particular committee is treated as a leader pro hac vice, and members who knew nothing of the