of the House, of questions of supply over questions of revenue. It is
imperative to grant money for the support of the government, but
questions of revenue revision may be postponed without inconvenience.
The two things do not necessarily go hand in hand, as they do in the
Commons. The reports of the Committee of Ways and Means are matters of
quite as high privilege as the reports of the Committee on
Appropriations, but they by no means stand an equal chance of gaining
the consideration of the House and reaching a passage. They have no
inseparable connection with the annual grants; the needed supplies will
be forthcoming without any readjustments of taxation to meet the
anticipated demands, because the taxes are not laid in the first
instance with reference to the expenses which are to be paid out of
their proceeds. If it were the function of the Committee of Ways and
Means, as it is of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to adjust the
revenue to the expenditures, their reports would be as essential a part
of the business of each session as are the reports of the Committee on
Appropriations; but their proposals, occupying, as they do, a very
different place in legislation, may go to the wall just as the proposals
of the other Committees do at the demand of the chairman of the great
spending Committee. The figures of the annual grants do not run near
enough to the sum of the annual receipts to make them at all dependent
on bills which concern the latter.
It would seem that the supervision exercised by Congress over
expenditures is more thorough than that which is exercised by the
Commons in England. In 1814 the House created a Standing Committee on
Public Expenditures whose duty it should be "to examine into the state
of the several public departments, and particularly into laws making
appropriations of money, and to report whether the moneys have been
disbursed conformably with such laws; and also to report from time to
time such provisions and arrangements as may be necessary to add to the
economy of the departments and the accountability of their officers;"
but this Committee stood as the only committee of audit for but two
years. It was not then abolished, but its jurisdiction was divided
amongst six other Committees on Expenditures in the several departments,
to which was added in 1860 a seventh, and in 1874 an eighth. There is
thus a separate Committee for the audit of the accounts of each of the
executive departments, beside which the original single Committee on
Public Expenditures stands charged with such duties as may have been
left it in the general distribution.[31] The duties of these eight
Committees are specified with great minuteness in the rules. They are
"to examine into the state of the accounts and expenditures respectively
submitted to them, and to inquire and report particularly," whether the
expenditures of the respective departments are warranted by law;
"whether the claims from time to time satisfied and discharged by the
respective departments are supported by sufficient vouchers,
establishing their justness both as to their character and amount;
whether such claims have been discharged out of funds appropriated
therefor, and whether all moneys have been disbursed in conformity with
appropriation laws; and whether any, or what, provisions are necessary
to be adopted, to provide more perfectly for the proper application of
the public moneys, and to secure the government from demands unjust in
their character or extravagant in their amount." Besides exercising
these functions of careful audit, they are, moreover, required to
"report from time to time" any plans for retrenchment that may appear
advisable in the interests of economy, or any measures that may be
necessary to secure greater efficiency or to insure stricter
accountability to Congress in the management of the departments; to
ferret out all abuses that may make their appearance; and to see to it
that no department has useless offices in its bureaux, or over or
under-paid officers on its rolls.
But, though these Committees are so many and so completely armed with
powers, indications are not wanting that more abuses run at large in
the departments than they, with all their eyes, are able to detect. The
Senate, though it has no similar permanent committees, has sometimes
discovered dishonest dealings that had altogether escaped the vigilance
of the eight House Committees; and even these eight occasionally, by a
special effort, bring to light transactions which would never have been
unearthed in the ordinary routine course of their usual procedure. It
was a select committee of the Senate which, during the sessions of the
Forty-seventh Congress, discovered that the "contingent fund" of the
Treasury department had been spent in repairs on the Secretary's private
residence, for expensive suppers spread before the Secretary's political
friends, for lemonade for the delectation of the Secretary's private
palate, for bouquets for the gratification of the Secretary's busiest
allies, for carpets never delivered, "ice" never used, and services
never rendered;[32] although these were secrets of which the honest
faces of the vouchers submitted with the accounts gave not a hint.
It is hard to see how there could have been anything satisfactory or
conclusive in the annual supervision of the public accounts during any
but the latest years of this system of committee audit. Before 1870 our
national book-keeping was much like that still in vogue in France.
Credits once granted ran on without period until they were exhausted.
There were always unexpended balances to confuse the accounts; and when
the figures of the original grants had been on a too generous scale, as
was often the case, these balances accumulated from year to year in
immense surpluses, sometimes of many millions, of whose use no account
was given, and which consequently afforded means for all sorts of
extravagance and peculation. In 1870 this abuse was partially corrected
by a law which limited such accumulations to a period of two years, and
laid hands, on behalf of the Treasury, on the $174,000,000 of unexpended
balances which had by that time been amassed in the several departments;
but it was not till 1874 that such a rule of expenditure and accounting
was established as would make intelligent audit by the Committees
possible, by a proper circumscription of the time during which credits
could be drawn upon without a regrant.[33]
Such is a general view, in brief and without technical detail, of the
chief features of our financial system, of the dealings of Congress with
the questions of revenue, expenditure, and supply. The contrast which
this system offers to the old-world systems, of which the British is the
most advanced type, is obviously a very striking one. The one is the
very opposite of the others. On the one hand is a financial policy
regulated by a compact, cooperative ministry under the direction of a
representative chamber, and on the other hand a financial policy
directed by the representative body itself, with only clerical aid from
the executive. In our practice, in other words, the Committees are the
ministers, and the titular ministers only confidential clerks. There is
no concurrence, not even a nominal alliance, between the several
sections of this committee-ministry, though their several duties are
clearly very nearly akin and as clearly mutually dependent. This feature
of disintegration in leadership runs, as I have already pointed out,
through all our legislation; but it is manifestly of much more serious
consequence in financial administration than in the direction of other
concerns of government. There can be no doubt that, if it were not for
the fact that our revenues are not regulated with any immediate
reference to the expenditures of the government, this method of spending
according to the suggestions of one body, and taxing in obedience to
the suggestions of another entirely distinct, would very quickly bring
us into distress; it would unquestionably break down under any attempt
to treat revenue and expenditure as mutually adjustable parts of a
single, uniform, self-consistent system. They can be so treated only
when they are under the management of a single body; only when all
financial arrangements are based upon schemes prepared by a few men of
trained minds and accordant principles, who can act with easy agreement
and with perfect confidence in each other. When taxation is regarded
only as a source of revenue and the chief object of financial management
is the graduation of outlays by income, the credit and debit sides of
the account must come under a single eye to be properly balanced; or, at
the least, those officers who raise the money must see and be guided by
the books of those who spend it.
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 shifted 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 passed 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 illustrations 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
passed inconsiderately and in haste, almost secretly indeed; and several
members of Congress had previously complained that the demonetization
scheme of 1873 had been pushed surreptitiously through the courses of
its passage, 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
nobody 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
constituencies. 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 assembly
whose organization is so complex, whose acts are apparently so
haphazard, and in which responsibility is spread so thin, throws
constituencies 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. Constituencies 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 membership 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
titular 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 mass 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 mass 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 constituencies 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 shifted 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 membership 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 assembly 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.