and Congress which so much complicates our system of party government.
The history of administrations is not necessarily the history of
parties. Presidential elections may turn the scale of party ascendency
one way, and the intermediate congressional elections may quite reverse
the balance. A strong party administration, by which the energy of the
State is concentrated in the hands of a single well-recognized political
organization, which is by reason of its power saddled with all
responsibility, may sometimes be possible, but it must often be
impossible. We are thus shut out in part from real party government such
as we desire, and such as it is unquestionably desirable to set up in
every system like ours. Party government can exist only when the
absolute control of administration, the appointment of its officers as
well as the direction of its means and policy, is given immediately
into the hands of that branch of the government whose power is
paramount, the representative body. Roger Sherman, whose perception was
amongst the keenest and whose sagacity was amongst the surest in the
great Convention of 1787, was very bold and outspoken in declaring this
fact and in proposing to give it candid recognition. Perceiving very
clearly the omnipotence which must inevitably belong to a national
Congress such as the convention was about to create, he avowed that "he
considered the executive magistracy as nothing more than an institution
for carrying the will of the legislature into effect; that the person or
persons [who should constitute the executive] ought to be appointed by,
and accountable to, the legislature only, which was the depository of
the supreme will of the society." Indeed, the executive was in his view
so entirely the servant of the legislative will that he saw good reason
to think that the legislature should judge of the number of persons of
which the executive should be composed; and there seem to have been
others in the convention who went along with him in substantial
agreement as to these matters. It would seem to have been only a desire
for the creation of as many as possible of those balances of power which
now decorate the "literary theory" of the Constitution which they made
that prevented a universal acquiescence in these views.
The anomaly which has resulted is seen most clearly in the party
relations of the President and his Cabinet. The President is a
partisan,--is elected because he is a partisan,--and yet he not
infrequently negatives the legislation passed by the party whom he
represents; and it may be said to be nowadays a very rare thing to find
a Cabinet made up of truly representative party men. They are the men of
his party whom the President likes, but not necessarily or always the
men whom that party relishes. So low, indeed, has the reputation of some
of our later Cabinets fallen, even in the eyes of men of their own
political connection, that writers in the best of our public prints feel
at full liberty to speak of their members with open contempt. "When
Mr.---- was made Secretary of the Navy," laughs the New York "Nation,"
"no one doubted that he would treat the Department as 'spoils,' and
consequently nobody has been disappointed. He is one of the statesmen
who can hardly conceive of a branch of the public Administration having
no spoils in it." And that this separation of the Cabinet from real
party influence, and from the party leadership which would seem properly
to belong to its official station, is a natural result of our
constitutional scheme is made patent in the fact that the Cabinet has
advanced in party insignificance as the system has grown older. The
connection between the early Cabinets and the early Congresses was very
like the relations between leaders and their party. Both Hamilton and
Gallatin led rather than obeyed the Houses; and it was many years before
the suggestions of heads of departments ceased to be sure of respectful
and acquiescent consideration from the legislative Committees. But as
the Committees gained facility and power the leadership of the Cabinet
lost ground. Congress took command of the government so soon as ever it
got command of itself, and no Secretary of to-day can claim by virtue of
his office recognition as a party authority. Congress looks upon advice
offered to it by anybody but its own members as gratuitous impertinence.
At the same time it is quite evident that the means which Congress has
of controlling the departments and of exercising the searching oversight
at which it aims are limited and defective. Its intercourse with the
President is restricted to the executive messages, and its intercourse
with the departments has no easier channels than private consultations
between executive officials and the Committees, informal interviews of
the ministers with individual members of Congress, and the written
correspondence which the cabinet officers from time to time address to
the presiding officers of the two Houses, at stated intervals, or in
response to formal resolutions of inquiry. Congress stands almost
helplessly outside of the departments. Even the special, irksome,
ungracious investigations which it from time to time institutes in its
spasmodic endeavors to dispel or confirm suspicions of malfeasance or of
wanton corruption do not afford it more than a glimpse of the inside of
a small province of federal administration. Hostile or designing
officials can always hold it at arm's length by dexterous evasions and
concealments. It can violently disturb, but it cannot often fathom, the
waters of the sea in which the bigger fish of the civil service swim and
feed. Its dragnet stirs without cleansing the bottom. Unless it have at
the head of the departments capable, fearless men, altogether in its
confidence and entirely in sympathy with its designs, it is clearly
helpless to do more than affright those officials whose consciences are
their accusers.
And it is easy to see how the commands as well as the questions of
Congress may be evaded, if not directly disobeyed, by the executive
agents. Its Committees may command, but they cannot superintend the
execution of their commands. The Secretaries, though not free enough to
have any independent policy of their own, are free enough to be very
poor, because very unmanageable, servants. Once installed, their hold
upon their offices does not depend upon the will of Congress. If they
please the President, and keep upon living terms with their colleagues,
they need not seriously regard the displeasure of the Houses, unless,
indeed, by actual crime, they rashly put themselves in the way of its
judicial wrath. If their folly be not too overt and extravagant, their
authority may continue theirs till the earth has four times made her
annual journey round the sun. They may make daily blunders in
administration and repeated mistakes in business, may thwart the plans
of Congress in a hundred small, vexatious ways, and yet all the while
snap their fingers at its dissatisfaction or displeasure. They are
denied the gratification of possessing real power, but they have the
satisfaction of being secure in a petty independence which gives them a
chance to be tricky and scheming. There are ways and ways of obeying;
and if Congress be not pleased, why need they care? Congress did not
give them their places, and cannot easily take them away.
Still it remains true that all the big affairs of the departments are
conducted in obedience to the direction of the Standing Committees. The
President nominates, and with legislative approval appoints, to the more
important offices of the government, and the members of the Cabinet
have the privilege of advising him as to matters in most of which he has
no power of final action without the concurrence of the Senate; but the
gist of all policy is decided by legislative, not by executive, will. It
can be no great satisfaction to any man to possess the barren privilege
of suggesting the best means of managing the every-day routine business
of the several bureaux so long as the larger plans which that business
is meant to advance are made for him by others who are set over him. If
one is commanded to go to this place or to that place, and must go, will
he, nill he, it can be but small solace to him that he is left free to
determine whether he will ride or walk in going the journey. The only
serious questions are whether or not this so great and real control
exerted by Congress can be exercised efficiently and with sufficient
responsibility to those whom Congress represents, and whether good
government is promoted by the arrangement.
No one, I take it for granted, is disposed to disallow the principle
that the representatives of the people are the proper ultimate authority
in all matters of government, and that administration is merely the
clerical part of government. Legislation is the originating force. It
determines what shall be done; and the President, if he cannot or will
not stay legislation by the use of his extraordinary power as a branch
of the legislature, is plainly bound in duty to render unquestioning
obedience to Congress. And if it be his duty to obey, still more is
obedience the bounden duty of his subordinates. The power of making laws
is in its very nature and essence the power of directing, and that power
is given to Congress. The principle is without drawback, and is
inseparably of a piece with all Anglo-Saxon usage; the difficulty, if
there be any, must lie in the choice of means whereby to energize the
principle. The natural means would seem to be the right on the part of
the representative body to have all the executive servants of its will
under its close and constant supervision, and to hold them to a strict
accountability: in other words, to have the privilege of dismissing them
whenever their service became unsatisfactory. This is the
matter-of-course privilege of every other master; and if Congress does
not possess it, its mastery is hampered without being denied. The
executive officials are its servants all the same; the only difference
is that if they prove negligent, or incapable, or deceitful servants
Congress must rest content with the best that can be got out of them
until its chief administrative agent, the President, chooses to appoint
better. It cannot make them docile, though it may compel them to be
obedient in all greater matters. In authority of rule Congress is made
master, but in means of rule it is made mere magistrate. It commands
with absolute lordship, but it can discipline for disobedience only by
slow and formal judicial process.
Upon Machiavelli's declaration that "nothing is more important to the
stability of the state than that facility should be given by its
constitution for the accusation of those who are supposed to have
committed any public wrong," a writer in the "Westminster Review" makes
this thoughtful comment: "The benefit of such a provision is twofold.
First, the salutary fear of the probable coming of a day of account will
restrain the evil practices of some bad men and self-seekers; secondly,
the legal outlet of accusation gives vent to peccant humors in the body
politic, which, if checked and driven inward, would work to the utter
ruin of the constitution; ... the distinction is lost between accusation
and calumny."[53] And of course it was these benefits which our federal
Constitution was meant to secure by means of its machinery of
impeachment. No servant of the state, not even the President himself,
was to be beyond the reach of accusation by the House of Representatives
and of trial by the Senate. But the processes of impeachment, like
those of amendment, are ponderous and difficult to handle. It requires
something like passion to set them a-going; and nothing short of the
grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give
them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overcrow party
interest may secure a conviction; nothing less can. Indeed, judging by
our past experiences, impeachment may be said to be little more than an
empty menace. The House of Representatives is a tardy grand jury, and
the Senate an uncertain court.
Besides, great crimes such as might speed even impeachment are not
ordinary things in the loosest public service. An open-eyed public
opinion can generally give them effective check. That which usually and
every day clogs and hampers good government is folly or incapacity on
the part of the ministers of state. Even more necessary, therefore, than
a power clothed with authority to accuse, try, and punish for public
crime is some ultimate authority, whose privilege it shall be to dismiss
for inefficiency. Impeachment is aimed altogether above the head of
business management. A merchant would not think it fair, even if it were
lawful, to shoot a clerk who could not learn the business. Dismissal is
quite as effective for his purposes, and more merciful to the clerk. The
crying inconvenience of our system is, therefore, that the
constitutional authority whose prerogative it is to direct policy and
oversee administration has fewer facilities for getting its work well
done than has the humblest citizen for obtaining satisfactory aid in his
own undertakings. The authority most interested in appointments and
dismissals in the civil service has little to do with the one and less
to do with the other. The President appoints with the sanction of the
Senate, and cannot dismiss his advisers without legislative consent;[54]
yet the ministers in reality serve, not the President, but Congress, and
Congress can neither appoint nor dismiss. In other words, the President
must in both acts take the initiative, though he is not the real master;
and Congress, which is the real master, has in these vital matters only
a consultative voice, which it may utter, through its upper chamber,
only when its opinion is asked. I should regard my business as a
hopeless undertaking if my chief agent had to be appointed by a third
party, and, besides being himself put beyond my power of control, were
charged with the choice and discipline of all his subordinates, subject
not to my directions, but simply to my acquiescence!
The relations existing between Congress and the departments must be
fatally demoralizing to both. There is and can be between them nothing
like confidential and thorough cooperation. The departments may be
excused for that attitude of hostility which they sometimes assume
towards Congress, because it is quite human for the servant to fear and
deceive the master whom he does not regard as his friend, but suspects
of being a distrustful spy of his movements. Congress cannot control the
officers of the executive without disgracing them. Its only whip is
investigation, semi-judicial examination into corners suspected to be
dirty. It must draw the public eye by openly avowing a suspicion of
malfeasance, and must then magnify and intensify the scandal by setting
its Committees to cross-examining scared subordinates and sulky
ministers. And after all is over and the murder out, probably nothing is
done. The offenders, if any one has offended, often remain in office,
shamed before the world, and ruined in the estimation of all honest
people, but still drawing their salaries and comfortably waiting for the
short memory of the public mind to forget them. Why unearth the carcass
if you cannot remove it?
Then, too, the departments frequently complain of the incessant
exactions made upon them by Congress. They grumble that they are kept
busy in satisfying its curiosity and in meeting the demands of its
uneasy activity. The clerks have ordinarily as much as they can do in
keeping afoot the usual routine business of their departments; but
Congress is continually calling upon them for information which must be
laboriously collected from all sorts of sources, remote and accessible.
A great speech in the Senate may cost them hours of anxious toil: for
the Senator who makes it is quite likely beforehand to introduce a
resolution calling upon one of the Secretaries for full statistics with
reference to this, that, or the other topic upon which he desires to
speak. If it be finance, he must have comparative tables of taxation; if
it be commerce or the tariff, he cannot dispense with any of the
minutest figures of the Treasury accounts; whatever be his theme, he
cannot lay his foundations more surely than upon official information,
and the Senate is usually unhesitatingly ready with an easy assent to
the resolution which puts the whole clerical force of the administration
at his service. And of course the House too asks innumerable questions,
which patient clerks and protesting Secretaries must answer to the last
and most minute particular. This is what the departmental officials
testily call the tyranny of Congress, and no impartial third person can
reasonably forbid them the use of the word.
I know of few things harder to state clearly and within reasonable
compass than just how the nation keeps control of policy in spite of
these hide-and-seek vagaries of authority. Indeed, it is doubtful if it
does keep control through all the roundabout paths which legislative and
executive responsibility are permitted to take. It must follow Congress
somewhat blindly; Congress is known to obey without altogether
understanding its Committees: and the Committees must consign the
execution of their plans to officials who have opportunities not a few
to hoodwink them. At the end of these blind processes is it probable
that the ultimate authority, the people, is quite clear in its mind as
to what has been done or what may be done another time? Take, for
example, financial policy,--a very fair example, because, as I have
shown, the legislative stages of financial policy are more talked about
than any other congressional business, though for that reason an extreme
example. If, after appropriations and adjustments of taxation have been
tardily and in much tribulation of scheming and argument agreed upon by
the House, the imperative suggestions and stubborn insistence of the
Senate confuse matters till hardly the Conference Committees themselves
know clearly what the outcome of the disagreements has been; and if,
when these compromise measures are launched as laws, the method of their
execution is beyond the view of the Houses, in the semi-privacy of the
departments, how is the comprehension--not to speak of the will--of the
people to keep any sort of hold upon the course of affairs? There are no
screws of responsibility which they can turn upon the consciences or
upon the official thumbs of the congressional Committees principally
concerned. Congressional Committees are nothing to the nation: they are
only pieces of the interior mechanism of Congress. To Congress they
stand or fall. And, since Congress itself can scarcely be sure of having
its own way with them, the constituencies are manifestly unlikely to be
able to govern them. As for the departments, the people can hardly do
more in drilling them to unquestioning obedience and docile efficiency
than Congress can. Congress is, and must be, in these matters the
nation's eyes and voice. If it cannot see what goes wrong and cannot get
itself heeded when it commands, the nation likewise is both blind and
dumb.
This, plainly put, is the practical result of the piecing of authority,
the cutting of it up into small bits, which is contrived in our
constitutional system. Each branch of the government is fitted out with
a small section of responsibility, whose limited opportunities afford to
the conscience of each many easy escapes. Every suspected culprit may
shift the responsibility upon his fellows. Is Congress rated for
corrupt or imperfect or foolish legislation? It may urge that it has to
follow hastily its Committees or do nothing at all but talk; how can it
help it if a stupid Committee leads it unawares into unjust or fatuous
enterprises? Does administration blunder and run itself into all sorts
of straits? The Secretaries hasten to plead the unreasonable or unwise
commands of Congress, and Congress falls to blaming the Secretaries. The
Secretaries aver that the whole mischief might have been avoided if they
had only been allowed to suggest the proper measures; and the men who
framed the existing measures in their turn avow their despair of good
government so long as they must intrust all their plans to the bungling
incompetence of men who are appointed by and responsible to somebody
else. How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the
whipping?
Moreover, it is impossible to deny that this division of authority and
concealment of responsibility are calculated to subject the government
to a very distressing paralysis in moments of emergency. There are few,
if any, important steps that can be taken by any one branch of the
government without the consent or cooperation of some other branch.
Congress must act through the President and his Cabinet; the President
and his Cabinet must wait upon the will of Congress. There is no one
supreme, ultimate head--whether magistrate or representative body--which
can decide at once and with conclusive authority what shall be done at
those times when some decision there must be, and that immediately. Of
course this lack is of a sort to be felt at all times, in seasons of
tranquil rounds of business as well as at moments of sharp crisis; but
in times of sudden exigency it might prove fatal,--fatal either in
breaking down the system or in failing to meet the emergency.[55] Policy
cannot be either prompt or straightforward when it must serve many
masters. It must either equivocate, or hesitate, or fail altogether. It
may set out with clear purpose from Congress, but get waylaid or maimed
by the Executive.
If there be one principle clearer than another, it is this: that in any
business, whether of government or of mere merchandising, _somebody must
be trusted_, in order that when things go wrong it may be quite plain
who should be punished. In order to drive trade at the speed and with
the success you desire, you must confide without suspicion in your chief
clerk, giving him the power to ruin you, because you thereby furnish
him with a motive for serving you. His reputation, his own honor or
disgrace, all his own commercial prospects, hang upon your success. And
human nature is much the same in government as in the dry-goods trade.
_Power and strict accountability for its use_ are the essential
constituents of good government. A sense of highest responsibility, a
dignifying and elevating sense of being trusted, together with a
consciousness of being in an official station so conspicuous that no
faithful discharge of duty can go unacknowledged and unrewarded, and no
breach of trust undiscovered and unpunished,--these are the influences,
the only influences, which foster practical, energetic, and trustworthy
statesmanship. The best rulers are always those to whom great power is
intrusted in such a manner as to make them feel that they will surely be
abundantly honored and recompensed for a just and patriotic use of it,
and to make them know that nothing can shield them from full retribution
for every abuse of it.