Prime Minister, the real head of the executive, by the Commons in
England, furnishes us with a contrast rather than with a parallel to the
election of our premier, the head of our executive, by a deliberative,
representative body, because of the difference of function and of tenure
between our Presidents and English Prime Ministers. William Pitt was
elected to rule the House of Commons, John Adams to hold a
constitutional balance against the Houses of Congress. The one was the
leader of the legislature; the other, so to say, the colleague of the
legislature. Besides, the Commons can not only make but also unmake
Ministries; whilst conventions can do nothing but bind their parties by
nomination, and nothing short of a well-nigh impossible impeachment can
unmake a President, except four successions of the seasons. As has been
very happily said by a shrewd critic, our system is essentially
astronomical. A President's usefulness is measured, not by efficiency,
but by calendar months. It is reckoned that if he be good at all he will
be good for four years. A Prime Minister must keep himself in favor with
the majority, a President need only keep alive.
Once the functions of a presidential elector were very august. He was to
speak for the people; they were to accept his judgment as theirs. He was
to be as eminent in the qualities which win trust as was the greatest of
the Imperial Electors in the power which inspires fear. But now he is
merely a registering machine,--a sort of bell-punch to the hand of his
party convention. It gives the pressure, and he rings. It is, therefore,
patent to every one that that portion of the Constitution which
prescribes his functions is as though it were not. A very simple and
natural process of party organization, taking form first in
congressional caucuses and later in nominating conventions, has
radically altered a Constitution which declares that it can be amended
only by the concurrence of two thirds of Congress and three fourths of
the States. The sagacious men of the constitutional convention of 1787
certainly expected their work to be altered, but can hardly have
expected it to be changed in so informal a manner.
The conditions which determine the choice of a nominating convention
which names a President are radically different from the conditions
which facilitate the choice of a representative chamber which selects
for itself a Prime Minister. "Among the great purposes of a national
parliament are these two," says Mr. Parton:[47] "first, to train men for
practical statesmanship; and secondly, to exhibit them to the country,
so that, when men of ability are wanted, they can be found without
anxious search and perilous trial." In those governments which are
administered by an executive committee of the legislative body, not only
this training but also this exhibition is constant and complete. The
career which leads to cabinet office is a career of self-exhibition. The
self-revelation is made in debate, and so is made to the nation at large
as well as to the Ministry of the day, who are looking out for able
recruits, and to the Commons, whose ear is quick to tell a voice which
it will consent to hear, a knowledge which it will pause to heed. But in
governments like our own, in which legislative and executive services
are altogether dissociated, this training is incomplete, and this
exhibition almost entirely wanting. A nominating convention does not
look over the rolls of Congress to pick a man to suit its purpose; and
if it did it could not find him, because Congress is not a school for
the preparation of administrators, and the convention is supposed to be
searching not for an experienced committee-man, but for a tried
statesman. The proper test for its application is not the test by which
congressmen are assayed. They make laws, but they do not have to order
the execution of the laws they make. They have a great deal of
experience in directing, but none at all in being directed. Their care
is to pass bills, not to keep them in running order after they have
become statutes. They spend their lives without having anything to do
directly with administration, though administration is dependent upon
the measures which they enact.
A Presidential convention, therefore, when it nominates a man who is, or
has been, a member of Congress, does not nominate him because of his
congressional experience, but because it is thought that he has other
abilities which were not called out in Congress. Andrew Jackson had been
a member of Congress, but he was chosen President because he had won the
battle of New Orleans and had driven the Indians from Florida. It was
thought that his military genius evinced executive genius. The men whose
fame rests altogether upon laurels won in Congress have seldom been more
successful than Webster and Henry Clay in their candidacy for the chief
magistracy. Washington was a soldier; Jefferson cut but a sorry figure
in debate; Monroe was a diplomatist; it required diligent inquiry to
find out what many of our Presidents had been before they became
candidates; and eminency in legislative service has always been at best
but an uncertain road to official preferment.
Of late years a tendency is observable which seems to be making the
gubernatorial chairs of the greater States the nearest offices to the
Presidency; and it cannot but be allowed that there is much that is
rational in the tendency. The governorship of a State is very like a
smaller Presidency; or, rather, the Presidency is very like a big
governorship. Training in the duties of the one fits for the duties of
the other. This is the only avenue of subordinate place through which
the highest place can be naturally reached. Under the cabinet
governments abroad a still more natural line of promotion is arranged.
The Ministry is a legislative Ministry, and draws its life from the
legislature, where strong talents always secure executive place. A long
career in Parliament is at least a long contact with practical
statesmanship, and at best a long schooling in the duties of the
practical statesman. But with us there is no such intimate relationship
between legislative and executive service. From experience in state
administration to trial in the larger sphere of federal administration
is the only natural order of promotion. We ought, therefore, to hail the
recognition of this fact as in keeping with the general plan of the
federal Constitution. The business of the President, occasionally
great, is usually not much above routine. Most of the time it is _mere_
administration, mere obedience of directions from the masters of policy,
the Standing Committees. Except in so far as his power of veto
constitutes him a part of the legislature, the President might, not
inconveniently, be a permanent officer; the first official of a
carefully-graded and impartially regulated civil service system, through
whose sure series of merit-promotions the youngest clerk might rise even
to the chief magistracy.[48] He is part of the official rather than of
the political machinery of the government, and his duties call rather
for training than for constructive genius. If there can be found in the
official systems of the States a lower grade of service in which men may
be advantageously drilled for Presidential functions, so much the
better. The States will have better governors, the Union better
Presidents, and there will have been supplied one of the most serious
needs left unsupplied by the Constitution,--the need for a proper school
in which to rear federal administrators.
Administration is something that men must learn, not something to skill
in which they are born. Americans take to business of all kinds more
naturally than any other nation ever did, and the executive duties of
government constitute just an exalted kind of business; but even
Americans are not Presidents in their cradles. One cannot have too much
preparatory training and experience who is to fill so high a magistracy.
It is difficult to perceive, therefore, upon what safe ground of reason
are built the opinions of those persons who regard short terms of
service as sacredly and peculiarly republican in principle. If
republicanism is founded upon good sense, nothing so far removed from
good sense can be part and parcel of it. Efficiency is the only just
foundation for confidence in a public officer, under republican
institutions no less than under monarchs; and short terms which cut off
the efficient as surely and inexorably as the inefficient are quite as
repugnant to republican as to monarchical rules of wisdom. Unhappily,
however, this is not American doctrine. A President is dismissed almost
as soon as he has learned the duties of his office, and a man who has
served a dozen terms in Congress is a curiosity. We are too apt to think
both the work of legislation and the work of administration easy enough
to be done readily, with or without preparation, by any man of
discretion and character. No one imagines that the dry-goods or the
hardware trade, or even the cobbler's craft, can be successfully
conducted except by those who have worked through a laborious and
unremunerative apprenticeship, and who have devoted their lives to
perfecting themselves as tradesmen or as menders of shoes. But
legislation is esteemed a thing which may be taken up with success by
any shrewd man of middle age, which a lawyer may now and again
advantageously combine with his practice, or of which any intelligent
youth may easily catch the knack; and administration is regarded as
something which an old soldier, an ex-diplomatist, or a popular
politician may be trusted to take to by instinct. No man of tolerable
talents need despair of having been born a Presidential candidate.
These must be pronounced very extraordinary conclusions for an eminently
practical people to have accepted; and it must be received as an
awakening of good sense that there is nowadays a decided inclination
manifested on the part of the nation to supply training-schools for the
Presidency in like minor offices, such as the governorships of the
greater States. For the sort of Presidents needed under the present
arrangement of our federal government, it is best to choose amongst the
ablest and most experienced state governors.
So much for nomination and election. But, after election, what then?
The President is not all of the Executive. He cannot get along without
the men whom he appoints, with and by the consent and advice of the
Senate; and they are really integral parts of that branch of the
government which he titularly contains in his one single person. The
characters and training of the Secretaries are of almost as much
importance as his own gifts and antecedents; so that his appointment and
the Senate's confirmation must be added to the machinery of nomination
by convention and election by automatic electors before the whole
process of making up a working executive has been noted. The early
Congresses seem to have regarded the Attorney-General and the four
Secretaries[49] who constituted the first Cabinets as something more
than the President's lieutenants. Before the republican reaction which
followed the supremacy of the Federalists, the heads of the departments
appeared in person before the Houses to impart desired information, and
to make what suggestions they might have to venture, just as the
President attended in person to read his "address." They were always
recognized units in the system, never mere ciphers to the Presidential
figure which led them. Their wills counted as independent wills.
The limits of this independence would seem, however, never to have been
very clearly defined. Whether or not the President was to take the
advice of his appointees and colleagues appears to have depended always
upon the character and temper of the President. Here, for example, is
what was reported in 1862. "We pretend to no state secrets," said the
New York "Evening Post,"[50] "but we have been told, upon what we deem
good authority, that no such thing as a combined, unitary, deliberative
administration exists; that the President's brave willingness to take
all responsibility has quite neutralized the idea of a joint
responsibility; and that orders of the highest importance are issued,
and movements commanded, which cabinet officers learn of as other people
do, or, what is worse, which the cabinet officers disapprove and protest
against. Each cabinet officer, again, controls his own department pretty
much as he pleases, without consultation with the President or with his
coadjutors, and often in the face of determinations which have been
reached by the others." A picture this which forcibly reminds one of a
certain imperious Prime Minister, in his last days created Earl of
Chatham. These reports may have been true or they may have been mere
rumors; but they depict a perfectly possible state of affairs. There is
no influence except the ascendency or tact of the President himself to
keep a Cabinet in harmony and to dispose it to cooperation; so that it
would be very difficult to lay down any rules as to what elements really
constitute an Executive. Those elements can be determined exactly of
only one administration at a time, and of that only after it has closed,
and some one who knows its secrets has come forward to tell them. We
think of Mr. Lincoln rather than of his Secretaries when we look back to
the policy of the war-time; but we think of Mr. Hamilton rather than of
President Washington when we look back to the policy of the first
administration. Daniel Webster was bigger than President Fillmore, and
President Jackson was bigger than Mr. Secretary Van Buren. It depends
for the most part upon the character and training, the previous station,
of the cabinet officers, whether or not they act as governing factors in
administration, just as it depends upon the President's talents and
preparatory schooling whether or not he is a mere figure-head. A weak
President may prove himself wiser than the convention which nominated
him, by overshadowing himself with a Cabinet of notables.
From the necessity of the case, however, the President cannot often be
really supreme in matters of administration, except as the Speaker of
the House of Representatives is supreme in legislation, as appointer of
those who are supreme in its several departments. The President is no
greater than his prerogative of veto makes him; he is, in other words,
powerful rather as a branch of the legislature than as the titular head
of the Executive. Almost all distinctively executive functions are
specifically bestowed upon the heads of the departments. No President,
however earnest and industrious, can keep the Navy in a state of
creditable efficiency if he have a corrupt or incapable Secretary in the
Navy Department; he cannot prevent the army from suffering the damage of
demoralization if the Secretary of War is without either ability,
experience, or conscience; there will be corrupt jobs in the Department
of Justice, do what he will to correct the methods of a deceived or
deceitful Attorney-General; he cannot secure even-handed equity for the
Indian tribes if the Secretary of the Interior chooses to thwart him;
and the Secretary of State may do as much mischief behind his back as
can the Secretary of the Treasury. He might master the details and so
control the administration of some one of the departments, but he can
scarcely oversee them all with any degree of strictness. His knowledge
of what they have done or are doing comes, of course, from the
Secretaries themselves, and his annual messages to Congress are in
large part but a recapitulation of the chief contents of the detailed
reports which the heads of the departments themselves submit at the same
time to the Houses.
It is easy, however, to exaggerate the power of the Cabinet. After all
has been said, it is evident that they differ from the permanent
officials only in not being permanent. Their tenure of office is made to
depend upon the supposition that their functions are political rather
than simply ministerial, independent rather than merely instrumental.
They are made party representatives because of the fiction that they
direct policy. In reality the First Comptroller of the Treasury has
almost, if not quite, as much weight in directing departmental business
as has the Secretary of the Treasury himself, and it would practically
be quite as useful to have his office, which is in intention permanent,
vacated by every change of administration as to have that rule with
regard to the office of his official chief. The permanent organization,
the clerical forces of the departments, have in the Secretaries a sort
of _sliding top_; though it would probably be just as convenient in
practice to have this lid permanent as to have it movable. That the
Secretaries are not in fact the directors of the executive policy of the
government, I have shown in pointing out the thorough-going supervision
of even the details of administration which it is the disposition of the
Standing Committees of Congress to exercise. In the actual control of
affairs no one can do very much without gaining the ears of the
Committees. The heads of the departments could, of course, act much more
wisely in many matters than the Committees can, because they have an
intimacy with the workings and the wants of those departments which no
Committee can possibly possess. But Committees prefer to govern in the
dark rather than not to govern at all, and the Secretaries, as a matter
of fact, find themselves bound in all things larger than routine details
by laws which have been made for them and which they have no legitimate
means of modifying.
Of course the Secretaries are in the leading-strings of statutes, and
all their duties look towards a strict obedience to Congress. Congress
made them and can unmake them. It is to Congress that they must render
account for the conduct of administration. The head of each department
must every year make a detailed report of the expenditures of the
department, and a minute account of the facilities of work and the
division of functions in the department, naming each clerk of its force.
The chief duties of one cabinet officer will serve to illustrate the
chief duties of his colleagues. It is the duty of the Secretary of the
Treasury[51] "to prepare plans for the improvement and management of the
revenue and for the support of the public credit; to prescribe forms of
keeping and rendering all public accounts; to grant all warrants for
moneys to be issued from the Treasury in pursuance of appropriations
made by Congress; to report to the Senate or House, in person or in
writing, information required by them pertaining to his office; and to
perform all duties relating to finance that he shall be directed to
perform." "He is required to report to Congress annually, on the first
Monday in June, the results of the information compiled by the Bureau of
Statistics, showing the condition of manufactures, domestic trade,
currency, and banks in the several States and Territories." "He
prescribes regulations for the killing in Alaska Territory and adjacent
waters of minks, martens, sable, and other fur-bearing animals." "And he
must lay before Congress each session the reports of the Auditors,
showing the applications of the appropriations made for the War and Navy
Departments, and also abstracts and tabulated forms showing separate
accounts of the moneys received from internal duties."
Of course it is of the utmost importance that a Secretary who has
within his choice some of the minor plans for the management of the
revenue and for the maintenance of the public credit should be carefully
chosen from amongst men skilled in financial administration and
experienced in business regulation; but it is no more necessary that the
man selected for such responsible duties should be an active politician,
called to preside over his department only so long as the President who
appointed him continues to hold office and to like him, than it is to
have a strictly political officer to fulfill his other duty of
prescribing game laws for Alaska and Alaskan waters. Fur-bearing animals
can have no connection with political parties,--except, perhaps, as
"spoils." Indeed, it is a positive disadvantage that Mr. Secretary
should be chosen upon such a principle. He cannot have the knowledge,
and must therefore lack the efficiency, of a permanent official
separated from the partisan conflicts of politics and advanced to the
highest office of his department by a regular series of promotions won
by long service. The general policy of the government in matters of
finance, everything that affects the greater operations of the Treasury,
depends upon legislation, and is altogether in the hands of the
Committees of Ways and Means and of Finance; so that it is entirely
apart from good sense to make an essentially political office out of
the post of that officer who controls only administrative details.
And this remark would seem to apply with still greater force to the
offices of the other Secretaries. They have even lass energetic scope
than the Secretary of the Treasury has. There must under any system be
considerable power in the hands of the officer who handles and dispenses
vast revenues, even though he handle and dispense them as directed by
his employers. Money in its goings to and fro makes various mares go by
the way, so to speak. It cannot move in great quantities without moving
a large part of the commercial world with it. Management even of
financial details may be made instrumental in turning the money-markets
upside down. The Secretary of the Treasury is, therefore, less a mere
chief clerk than are his coadjutors; and if his duties are not properly
political, theirs certainly are not.
In view of this peculiarity of the Secretaries, in being appointed as
partisans and endowed as mere officials, it is interesting to inquire
what and whom they represent. They are clearly meant to represent the
political party to which they belong; but it very often happens that it
is impossible for them to do so. They must sometimes obey the opposite
party. It is our habit to speak of the party to which the President is
known to adhere and which has control of appointments to the offices of
the civil service as "the party in power;" but it is very evident that
control of the executive machinery is not all or even a very large part
of power in a country ruled as ours is. In so far as the President is an
executive officer he is the servant of Congress; and the members of the
Cabinet, being confined to executive functions, are altogether the
servants of Congress. The President, however, besides being titular head
of the executive service, is to the extent of his veto a third branch of
the legislature, and the party which he represents is in power in the
same sense that it would be in power if it had on its side a majority of
the members of either of the other two branches of Congress. If the
House and Senate are of one party and the President and his ministers of
the opposite, the President's party can hardly be said to be in power
beyond the hindering and thwarting faculty of the veto. The Democrats
were in power during the sessions of the Twenty-fifth Congress because
they had a majority in the Senate as well as Andrew Jackson in the White
House; but later Presidents have had both House and Senate against
them.[52]