incumbent has ever been found ready to incur that responsibility. In every other parliamentary country always excepting Germany, where private interests rule in a different way-financial proposals are open to any member of the legislature and are largely decided by committees, which have little or no public responsibility, are under secret pressure from private interests, and arrive at results by the process of lobbying and log-rolling which has been described. Is it democracy or government which is here in fault? Although Mr. Lecky nowhere expressly sets forth the danger from the absorption of the whole power of government by a legislature, he furnishes indications of it at almost every step. Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable in our constitutional history than the small stress which has been placed in England upon mere legislative machinery, upon constitutional laws definitely tracing the respective limits and powers of different institutions. The system of checks and counter-checks, which it has been the object of written constitutions to maintain, has been roughly maintained in England by the great diversities that long existed in the constituencies; by the powerful organizations of many distinct, and sometimes conflicting, interests; by the great influence and essentially representative character of the House of Lords. Many of the most important working elements in the constitution — the nature of the Cabinet, the functions of the Prime Minister, the dignity and the attitude of the Speaker, the initiative of the government in matters of finance, the extent to which the House of Lords may use its veto-rest essentially on the foundation of custom. As long as a genuine spirit of compromise in harmony with the general spirit of the constitution prevails in Parliament and governs the constituencies, so long the British constitution will prove a success. If this spirit is no longer found among rulers and parliaments and constituencies, there is no constitution which may be more easily dislocated, and which provides less means of checking excesses of bad government.1 Compare this with the remark of M. Dupriez,2 that the balance of power in government does not depend upon 1 Ibid., p. 114. 2 Ante, Chap. XXVII. written constitutions, but upon a struggle between the different branches, and then with the following: I do not think there is any single fact which is more evident to impartial observers than the declining efficiency and the lowered character of parliamentary government. The evil is certainly not restricted to England. All over Europe, and it may be added in a great measure in the United States, complaints of the same kind may be heard. A growing distrust and contempt for representative bodies has been one of the most characteristic features of the closing years of the nineteenth century. . . ... In England, no one can be insensible to the change in the tone of the House of Commons within the memory of living men. The old understandings and traditions, on which its deliberations have been for many generations successfully conducted, have largely disappeared, and new and stringent regulations have been found necessary. Scenes of coarse and brutal insult, of deliberate obstruction, of unrestrained violence, culminating on one occasion in actual blows, have been displayed within its walls to which there have been few parallels in other legislatures. . . . On the other hand, the power of arbitrarily closing debates, which has been placed in the hands of majorities, has been grossly abused. It has been made use of not merely to abridge but to prevent discussion on matters of momentous importance. And while this change has been passing over the spirit of the House of Commons, its powers and its pretensions are constantly extending. The enormous extension of ... the practice of questioning ministers has immensely increased the intervention of the House in the most delicate function of the executive. At the same time, the claim is more and more loudly put forward that it should be treated as if it were the sole power in the state. The veto of the sovereign has long since fallen into abeyance. Her constitutional right of dissolving Parliament if she believes that a minister or a majority do not truly represent the feelings of the nation, and are acting contrary to its interests, might sometimes be of the utmost value, but it is never likely to be put in force, while every interference of the House of Lords with the proposed legislation of the Commons has been, during a considerable part of the last few years, made the signal of insolent abuse. . . . In England, the min 1 February, 1771, Colonel Onslow brought charges against two printers. "Probably for the first time in English parliamentary history the forms of the House were employed for the purpose of systematic obstruction. By repeated amendments and adjournments the debate was protracted till past four in the morning, and the House was compelled to divide twenty-three times." ("History of England in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. III., p. 299.) It seems that obstruction is not a modern invention. istry is the creature of the House of Commons, but the organized force of a united cabinet is the most powerful restraint upon its proceedings. Most of the old power of the sovereign, as it has been truly said, has now passed to the Cabinet, and a solid body of the leaders of the majority, whose guidance is indispensable to the ascendency of their party, is able to exercise a strong controlling influence on all parliamentary proceedings. But the situation is much modified when parliaments break up into small groups. All over the world this has been one of the most marked and significant tendencies of democratic parliaments, and it will probably eventually lead to a profound change in the system of parliamentary government. . . . All the signs of the times point to the probability in England, as elsewhere, of many ministries resting on precarious majorities, formed out of independent or heterogeneous groups. There are few conditions less favorable to the healthy working of parliamentary institutions, or in which the danger of an uncontrolled House of Commons is more evident. One consequence of this disintegration of Parliament is a greatly increased probability that policies which the nation does not really wish for may be carried into effect. The process which the Americans call 'log-rolling' becomes very easy. One minority will agree to support the objects of another minority, on condition of receiving in return a similar assistance, and a number of small minorities aiming at different objects, no one of which is really desired by the majority of the nation, may attain their several ends by forming themselves into a political syndicate and mutually coöperating.1 It is a saying of the great German historian, Sybel, "that the realization of universal suffrage in its consequences has always been the beginning of the end of all parliamentarism." I believe that a large majority of the most serious and dispassionate observers of the political world are coming steadily to the same conclusion.2 And this great German historian generalizes in this sweeping way about an institution which has never existed in the world till after the first quarter of this century. Of all the forms of government that are possible among mankind, I do not know any which is likely to be worse than the government of a single omnipotent democratic chamber. It is at least as susceptible as an individual despot to the temptations that grow out of the possession of an uncontrolled power, and it is likely to act with much less sense of responsibility and much less real deliberation. The 1 "Democracy and Liberty," pp. 118, 119, 120, 124, 126, 241. VOL. IIT necessity of making a great decision seldom fails to weigh heavily on a single despot, but when the responsibility is divided among a large assembly it is greatly attenuated. Every considerable assembly also, as it has been truly said, has at times something of the character of a mob,1 a statement which is just as true of a legislature even if divided into two chambers. The confusion becomes still greater when parliaments divide into a number of small, independent groups, each of them subordinating general political interests to the furtherance of some particular interests and opinions, and when the art of parliamentary government consists mainly of skill in combining these heterogeneous fractions in a single division. The first condition of good legislation on any particular question, as of most other good work, is that it should be single-minded that it should represent the application of the best available faculty to a special purpose. There is scarcely a contested question determined in Parliament in which motives wholly different from the ostensible ones, and wholly unconnected with the immediate issue, do not influence many votes.2 The experience of the past abundantly corroborates the views of those who dread government by a single chamber. In the English Commonwealth such a system for a short time existed, but the abolition of the House of Lords was soon followed by the expulsion of the Commons, and when Cromwell resolved to restore some measure of parliamentary government, he clearly saw that two chambers were indispensable, and he revived on another basis the House of Lords.3 We have argued that the result came from the abolition not of the House of Lords but of the executive power, the abolition of the House of Lords being only one of the effects of that. In America, Franklin had strongly advocated a single chamber, and in the American Confederation, which was formally adopted by the thirteen States in 1781, and which represented the United States in the first years of their independent existence, the Congress consisted of only one branch. It was invested with very small powers, and was almost as completely overshadowed by the State rights of its constituents as the Cromwellian House of Commons had been by the military power of the Commonwealth. But the very first article of the American Constitution, which was framed in 1787, divided the 2 p. 300. 1 Lecky, op. cit., p. 299. 8 p. 301. Congress into a Senate and a House of Representatives. In all the separate States the bicameral system exists, and it also exists in all the British colonies which have self-governing powers.1 We again maintain that the improvement, if in part, was not mainly in the establishment of two chambers, but in the creation of a strong executive power and the extension of the power of the federal government in some particulars directly over the population of the States. In France, Turgot and Siéyès advocated a single chamber, and in the French constitution of 1791 all power was placed in the hands of such a body, the result being one of the most appalling tyrannies in the history of mankind. In 1848 the same experiment was once more tried, and it once more conducted France through anarchy to despotism.2 Does anybody suppose that if the French in either case had established two chambers the result would have been any different? While agreeing with Mr. Lecky as to the desirableness, at least outside of cities, of two chambers, our contention is that in the cases quoted, as in the France, the Italy, and the United States of to-day, the real trouble is in the suppression of executive power and the usurpation of all government by the legislature. The tyranny of majorities is, of all forms of tyranny, that which, in the conditions of modern life, is most to be feared, and against which it should be the chief object of a wise statesman to provide.❜ It is precisely this tyranny which we hold to be an inevitable result of the despotism of a legislature; maintaining, further, that the real protection against it in England is, first, in the power and traditions of the Speaker, and second, and including the other, in the power of the executive ministry, holding the practical initiative of legislation; that the second chambers in France, Italy, and the United States afford but a slight and inefficient protection; that the impending danger in 2 p. 302. 8 p. 312. 1 Ibid. |