Representatives what it is, a disintegrate mass of jarring elements, and
the Senate what it is, a small, select, and leisurely House of
Representatives. Or perhaps it would be nearer the whole truth to say
that these are the circumstances and this the frame of government of
which the two Houses form a part. Were the Senate not supplied
principally by promotions from the House,--if it had, that is, a
membership made up of men specially trained for its peculiar duties,--it
would probably be much more effective than it is in fulfilling the great
function of instructive and business-like debate of public questions;
for its duties are enough unlike those of the House to be called
peculiar. Men who have acquired all their habits in the matter of
dealing with legislative measures in the House of Representatives, where
committee work is everything and public discussion nothing but "talking
to the country," find themselves still mere declaimers when they get
into the Senate, where no previous question utters its interrupting
voice from the tongues of tyrannical committee-men, and where,
consequently, talk is free to all.[37] Only superior talents, such as
very few men possess, could enable a Representative of long training to
change his spots upon entering the Senate. Most men will not fit more
than one sphere in life; and after they have been stretched or
compressed to the measure of that one they will rattle about loosely or
stick too tight in any other into which they may be thrust. Still, more
or less adjustment takes place in every case. If a new Senator knock
about too loosely amidst the free spaces of the rules of that august
body, he will assuredly have some of his biggest corners knocked off and
his angularities thus made smoother; if he stick fast amongst the
dignified courtesies and punctilious observances of the upper chamber,
he will, if he stick long enough, finally wear down to such a size, by
jostling, as to attain some motion more or less satisfactory. But it
must be said, on the other hand, that even if the Senate were made up of
something better than selections from the House, it would probably be
able to do little more than it does in the way of giving efficiency to
our system of legislation. For it has those same radical defects of
organization which weaken the House. Its functions also, like those of
the House, are segregated in the prerogatives of numerous Standing
Committees.[38] In this regard Congress is all of a piece. There is in
the Senate no more opportunity than exists in the House for gaining such
recognized party leadership as would be likely to enlarge a man by
giving him a sense of power, and to steady and sober him by filling him
with a grave sense of responsibility. So far as its organization
controls it, the Senate, notwithstanding the one or two special
excellences which make it more temperate and often more rational than
the House, has no virtue which marks it as of a different nature. Its
proceedings bear most of the characteristic features of committee
rule.[39] Its conclusions are suggested now by one set oL its members,
now by another set, and again by a third; an arrangement which is of
course quite effective in its case, as in that of the House, in
depriving it of that leadership which is valuable in more ways than in
imparting distinct purpose to legislative action, because it
concentrates party responsibility, attracts the best talents, and fixes
public interest.
Some Senators are, indeed, seen to be of larger mental stature and built
of stauncher moral stuff than their fellow-members, and it is not
uncommon for individual members to become conspicuous figures in every
great event in the Senate's deliberations. The public now and again
picks out here and there a Senator who seems to act and to speak with
true instinct of statesmanship and who unmistakably merits the
confidence of colleagues and of people. But such a man, however eminent,
is never more than _a_ Senator. No one is _the_ Senator. No one may
speak for his party as well as for himself; no one exercises the special
trust of acknowledged leadership. The Senate is merely a body of
individual critics, representing most of the not very diversified types
of a society substantially homogeneous; and the weight of every
criticism uttered in its chamber depends upon the weight of the critic
who utters it, deriving little if any addition to its specific gravity
from connection with the designs of a purposeful party organization. I
cannot insist too much upon this defect of congressional government,
because it is evidently radical. Leadership with authority over a great
ruling party is a prize to attract great competitors, and is in a free
government the only prize that will attract great competitors. Its
attractiveness is abundantly illustrated in the operations of the
British system. In England, where members of the Cabinet, which is
merely a Committee of the House of Commons, are the rulers of the
empire, a career in the Commons is eagerly sought by men of the rarest
gifts, because a career there is the best road, is indeed the only road,
to membership of the great Committee. A part in the life of Congress, on
the contrary, though the best career opened to men of ambition by our
system, has no prize at its end greater than membership of some one of
numerous Committees, between which there is some choice, to be sure,
because some of them have great and others only small jurisdictions, but
none of which has the distinction of supremacy in policy or of
recognized authority to do more than suggest. And posts upon such
Committees are the highest posts in the Senate just as they are in the
House pf Representatives.
In an address delivered on a recent occasion,[40] in the capacity of
President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, Mr. Froude, having in
mind, of course, British forms of government, but looking mediately at
all popular systems, said very pointedly that "In party government party
life becomes like a court of justice. The people are the judges, the
politicians the advocates, who," he adds caustically rather than justly,
"only occasionally and by accident speak their real opinions." "The
truly great political orators," he exclaims, "are the ornaments of
mankind, the most finished examples of noble feeling and perfect
expression, but they rarely understand the circumstances of their time.
They feel passionately, but for that reason they cannot judge calmly."
If we are to accept these judgments from Mr. Froude in the face of his
reputation for thinking somewhat too independently of evidence, we
should congratulate ourselves that we have in this country hit upon a
system which, now that it has reached its perfection, has left little or
no place for politicians to make false declarations or for the orator to
coin fine expression for views which are only feelings, except outside
of the legislative halls of the nation, upon the platform, where talk is
all that is expected. It would seem as if the seer had a much more
favorable opportunity in the committee-room than the orator can have,
and with us it is the committee-room which governs the legislative
chamber. The speech-making in the latter neither makes nor often
seriously affects the plans framed in the former; because the plans are
made before the speeches are uttered. This is self-evident of the
debates of the House; but even the speeches made in the Senate, free,
full, and earnest as they seem, are made, so to speak, after the
fact--not to determine the actions but to air the opinions of the body.
Still, it must be regarded as no inconsiderable addition to the
usefulness of the Senate that it enjoys a much greater freedom of
discussion than the House can allow itself. It permits itself a good
deal of talk in public about what it is doing,[41] and it commonly talks
a great deal of sense. It is small enough to make it safe to allow
individual freedom to its members, and to have, at the same time, such
order and sense of proportion in its proceedings as is characteristic of
small bodies, like boards of college trustees or of commercial
directors, who feel that their main object is business, not
speech-making, and so say all that is necessary without being tedious,
and do what they are called upon to do without need of driving
themselves with hurrying rules. Such rules, they seem to feel, are meant
only for big assemblies which have no power of self-control. Of course
the Senate talks more than an average board of directors would, because
the corporations which it represents are States, made up, politically
speaking, of numerous popular constituencies to which Senators, no less
than Representatives, must make speeches of a sort which, considering
their fellow-members alone, would be unnecessary if not impertinent and
out of taste, in the Senate chamber, but which will sound best in the
ears of the people, for whose ears they are intended, if delivered
there. Speeches which, so to say, run in the name of the Senate's
business will generally be more effectual for campaign uses at home than
any speech could be which should run in the name of the proper topics of
the stump. There is an air of doing one's duty by one's party in
speaking party platitudes or uttering party defiances on the floor of
the Senate or of the House. Of course, however, there is less temptation
to such speech-making in the Senate than in the House. The House knows
the terrible possibilities of this sort in store for it, were it to give
perfect freedom of debate to its three hundred and twenty-five members,
in these days when frequent mails and tireless tongues of telegraphy
bring every constituency within easy earshot of Washington; and it
therefore seeks to confine what little discussion it indulges in to the
few committee-men specially in charge of the business of each moment.
But the Senate is small and of settled habits, and has no such bugbear
to trouble it. It can afford to do without any _cloture_ or previous
question. No Senator is likely to want to speak on all the topics of the
session, or to prepare more speeches than can conveniently be spoken
before adjournment is imperatively at hand. The House can be counted
upon to waste enough time to leave some leisure to the upper chamber.
And there can be no question that the debates which take place every
session in the Senate are of a very high order of excellence. The
average of the ability displayed in its discussions not infrequently
rises quite to the level of those controversies of the past which we are
wont to call great because they furnished occasion to men like Webster
and Calhoun and Clay, whom we cannot now quite match in mastery of
knowledge and of eloquence. If the debates of the present are smothered
amongst the innumerable folios of the "Record," it is not because they
do not contain utterances worthy to be heeded and to gain currency, but
because they do not deal with questions of passion or of national
existence, such as ran through all the earlier debates, or because our
system so obscures and complicates party rule in legislation as to leave
nothing very interesting to the public eye dependent upon the
discussions of either House or Senate. What that is picturesque, or what
that is vital in the esteem of the partisan, is there in these wordy
contests about contemplated legislation? How does anybody know that
either party's prospects will be much affected by what is said when
Senators are debating, or, for that matter, by what is voted after their
longest flights of controversy?
Still, though not much heeded, the debates of the Senate are of great
value in scrutinizing and sifting matters which come up from the House.
The Senate's opportunities for open and unrestricted discussion and its
simple, comparatively unencumbered forms of procedure, unquestionably
enable it to fulfill with very considerable success its high functions
as a chamber of revision.
When this has been claimed and admitted, however, it still remains to be
considered whether two chambers of equal power strengthen by steadying,
or weaken by complicating, a system of representative government like
our own. The utility and excellence of a bicameral system has never, I
believe, been seriously questioned in this country; but M. Turgot
smiles with something like contempt at our affectation in copying the
House of Lords without having any lords to use for the purpose; and in
our own day Mr. Bagehot, who is much more competent to speak on this
head than was M. Turgot, has avowed very grave doubts as to the
practical advantage of a two-headed legislature--each head having its
own independent will. He finds much to recommend the House of Lords in
the fact that it is not, as theory would have it, coordinate and coequal
with the House of Commons, but merely "a revising and suspending House,"
altering what the Commons have done hastily or carelessly, and sometimes
rejecting "Bills on which the House of Commons is not yet thoroughly in
earnest,--upon which the nation is not yet determined."[42] He points
out the fact that the House of Lords has never in modern times been, as
a House, coequal in power with the House of Commons. Before the Reform
Bill of 1832 the peers were all-powerful in legislation; not, however,
because they were members of the House of Lords, but because they
nominated most of the members of the House of Commons. Since that
disturbing reform they have been thrown back upon the functions in
which they never were strong, the functions of a deliberative assembly.
These are the facts which seem to Mr. Bagehot to have made it possible
for legislation to make easy and satisfactory progress under a system
whose theory provided for fatal dead-locks between the two branches of
the supreme legislature.
In his view "the evil of two coequal Houses of distinct natures is
obvious." "Most constitutions," he declares, "have committed this
blunder. The two most remarkable Republican institutions in the world
commit it. In both the American and Swiss Constitutions the Upper House
has as much authority as the second; it could produce the maximum of
impediment--a dead-lock, if it liked; if it does not do so, it is owing
not to the goodness of the legal constitution, but to the discreetness
of the members of the Chamber. In both these constitutions this
dangerous division is defended by a peculiar doctrine.... It is said
that there must be in a federal government some institution, some
authority, some body possessing a veto in which the separate States
comprising the Confederation are all equal. I confess this doctrine has
to me no self-evidence, and it is assumed, but not proved. The State of
Delaware is not equal in power or influence to the State of New York,
and you cannot make it so by giving it an equal veto in an Upper
Chamber. The history of such an institution is indeed most natural. A
little State will like, and must like, to see some token, some memorial
mark, of its old independence preserved in the Constitution by which
that independence is extinguished. But it is one thing for an
institution to be natural, and another for it to be expedient. If indeed
it be that a federal government compels the erection of an Upper Chamber
of conclusive and coordinate authority, it is one more in addition to
the many other inherent defects of that kind of government. It may be
necessary to have the blemish, but it is a blemish just as much."
It would be in the highest degree indiscreet to differ lightly with any
conclusion to which Mr. Bagehot may have come in viewing that field of
critical exposition in which he was supreme, the philosophical analysis,
namely, of the English Constitution; and it must be apparent to any one
who reads the passage I have just now quoted that his eye sees very
keenly and truly even when he looks across sea at institutions which
were repugnant to his own way of thinking. But it is safe to say that he
did not see all in this instance, and that he was consequently in error
concerning the true nature of our federal legislative system. His error,
nevertheless, appears, not when we look only at the facts which he held
up to view, but when we look at other facts which he ignored. It is true
that the existence of two coequal Houses is an evil when those two
Houses are of distinct natures, as was the case under the Victorian
Constitution to which Mr. Bagehot refers by way of illustrative example.
Under that Constitution all legislative business was sometimes to be
seen quite suspended because of irreconcilable differences of opinion
between the Upper House, which represented the rich wool-growers of the
colony, and the Lower Assembly, which represented the lesser
wool-growers, perhaps, and the people who were not wool-growers at all.
The Upper House, in other words, was a class chamber, and thus stood
quite apart from anything like the principle embodied in our own Senate,
which is no more a class chamber than is the House of Representatives.
The prerogatives of the Senate do, indeed, render our legislative system
more complex, and for that reason possibly more cumbersome, than the
British; for our Senate can do more than the House of Lords. It can not
only question and stay the judgment of the Commons, but may always with
perfect safety act upon its own judgment and gainsay the more popular
chamber to the end of the longest chapter of the bitterest controversy.
It is quite as free to act as is any other branch of the government,
and quite as sure to have its acts regarded. But there is safety and
ease in the fact that the Senate never wishes to carry its resistance to
the House to that point at which resistance must stay all progress in
legislation; because there is really a "latent unity" between the Senate
and the House which makes continued antagonism between them next to
impossible--certainly in the highest degree improbable. The Senate and
the House are of different origins, but virtually of the same nature.
The Senate is less democratic than the House, and consequently less
sensible to transient phases of public opinion; but it is no less
sensible than the House of its ultimate accountability to the people,
and is consequently quite as obedient to the more permanent and
imperative judgments of the public mind. It cannot be carried so quickly
by every new sentiment, but it can be carried quickly enough. There is a
main chance of election time for it as well as for the House to think
about.
By the mode of its election and the greater length of the term by which
its seats are held, the Senate is almost altogether removed from that
temptation to servile obedience to the whims of popular constituencies
to which the House is constantly subject, without as much courage as
the Senate has to guard its virtue. But the men who compose the Senate
are of the same sort as the members of the House of Representatives, and
represent quite as various classes. Nowadays many of the Senators are,
indeed, very rich men, and there has come to be a great deal of talk
about their vast wealth and the supposed aristocratic tendencies which
it is imagined to breed. But even the rich Senators cannot be said to be
representatives of a class, as if they were all opulent wool-growers or
great land-owners. Their wealth is in all sorts of stocks, in all sorts
of machinery, in all sorts of buildings, in possessions of all the sorts
possible in a land of bustling commerce and money-making industries.
They have made their money in a hundred different ways, or have
inherited it from fathers who amassed it in enterprises too numerous to
imagine; and they have it invested here, there, and everywhere, in this,
that, and everything. Their wealth represents no class interests, but
all the interests of the commercial world. It represents the majority of
the nation, in a word; and so they can probably be trusted not to
neglect one set of interests for another; not to despoil the trader for
the sake of the farmer, or the farmer for the sake of the wool-grower,
or the wool-grower for the behoof of the herder of short-horned cattle.
At least the Senate is quite as trustworthy in this regard as is the
House of Representatives.
Inasmuch as the Senate is thus separated from class interests and quite
as representative of the nation at large as is the House of
Representatives, the fact that it is less quickly sensitive to the hasty
or impulsive movements of public opinion constitutes its value as a
check, a steadying weight, in our very democratic system. Our English
cousins have worked out for themselves a wonderfully perfect scheme of
government by gradually making their monarchy unmonarchical. They have
made of it a republic steadied by a reverenced aristocracy and pivoted
upon a stable throne. And just as the English system is a limited
monarchy because of Commons and Cabinet, ours may be said to be a
limited democracy because of the Senate. This has in the trial of the
scheme proved the chief value of that upper chamber which was instituted
principally as an earnest of the abiding equality and sovereignty of the
States. At any rate, this is the most conspicuous, and will prove to be
the most lasting, use of the Senate in our system. It is valuable in our
democracy in proportion as it is undemocratic. I think that a
philosophical analysis of any successful and beneficent system of
self-government will disclose the fact that its only effectual checks
consist in a mixture of elements, in a combination of seemingly
contradictory political principles; that the British government is
perfect in proportion as it is unmonarchical, and ours safe in
proportion as it is undemocratic; that the Senate saves us often from
headlong popular tyranny.
"The value, spirit, and essence of the House of Commons," said Burke,
"consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation;"
but the image of the nation's feelings should not be the only thing
reflected by the constitution of a free government. It is indispensable
that, besides the House of Representatives which runs on all fours with
popular sentiment, we should have a body like the Senate which may
refuse to run with it at all when it seems to be wrong--a body which has
time and security enough to keep its head, if only now and then and but
for a little while, till other people have had time to think. The Senate
is fitted to do deliberately and well the revising which is its
properest function, because its position as a representative of state
sovereignty is one of eminent dignity, securing for it ready and sincere
respect, and because popular demands, ere they reach it with definite
and authoritative suggestion, are diluted by passage through the
feelings and conclusions of the state legislatures, which are the
Senate's only immediate constituents. The Senate commonly feels with
the House, but it does not, so to say, feel so fast. It at least has a
chance to be the express image of those judgments of the nation which
are slower and more temperate than its feelings.
This it is which makes the Senate "the most powerful and efficient
second chamber that exists,"[43] and this it is which constitutes its
functions one of the effectual checks, one of the real balances, of our
system; though it is made to seem very insignificant in the literary
theory of the Constitution, where the checks of state upon federal
authorities, of executive prerogatives upon legislative powers, and of
Judiciary upon President and Congress, though some of them in reality
inoperative from the first and all of them weakened by many "ifs" and
"buts," are made to figure in the leading roles, as the characteristic
Virtues, triumphing over the characteristic Vices, of our new and
original political Morality-play.
It should, however, be accounted a deduction from the Senate's
usefulness that it is seldom sure of more than two thirds of itself for
more than four years at a time. In order that its life may be perpetual,
one third of its membership is renewed or changed every two years, each
third taking its turn at change or renewal in regular succession; and
this device has, of course, an appreciably weakening effect on the
legislative sinews of the Senate. Because the Senate mixes the parties
in the composition of its Committees just as the House does, and those
Committees must, consequently, be subjected to modification whenever the
biennial senatorial elections bring in new men, freshly promoted from
the House or from gubernatorial chairs. Places must be found for them at
once in the working organization which busies itself in the
committee-rooms. Six years is not the term of the Senate, but only of
each Senator. Reckoning from any year in which one third of the Senate
is elected, the term of the majority,--the two thirds not affected by
the election,--is an average of the four and the two years which it has
to live. There is never a time at which two thirds of the Senate have
more than four years of appointed service before them. And this constant
liability to change must, of course, materially affect the policy of the
body. The time assured it in which to carry out any enterprise of policy
upon which it may embark is seldom more than two years, the term of the
House. It may be checked no less effectually than the lower House by the
biennial elections, albeit the changes brought about in its membership
are effected, not directly by the people, but indirectly and more
slowly by the mediate operation of public opinion through the
legislatures of the States.