The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce

political allies respecting it. But there is no security for its representing any opinion or knowledge but his own. It may affect the management of an executive department, but the introducing member does not command departmental information, and will, if the bill passes, have nothing to do with the carrying out of its provisions. On the other hand, the officials of the government cannot submit bills; and if they find a congressman willing to bring them in, must leave the advocacy and conduct of the measure largely in his hands.

      2. The drafting of a measure depends on the pains taken and skill exerted by its author. Senate bills are usually well drafted because many senators are experienced lawyers; House bills are often crude and obscure. There does not exist either among the executive departments or in connection with Congress, any legal office charged with the duty of preparing bills, or of seeing that the form in which they pass is technically satisfactory.

      3. The only security for the consistency of the various measures of the same session is to be found in the fact that those which affect the same matter ought to be referred to the same committee. However, it often happens that there are two or more committees whose spheres of jurisdiction overlap, so that of two bills handling cognate matters, one may go to Committee A and the other to Committee B. Should different views of policy prevail in these two bodies, they may report to the House bills containing mutually repugnant provisions. There is nothing except unusual vigilance on the part of some member interested, to prevent both bills from passing. That mischief from this cause is not serious arises from the fact that out of the multitude of bills introduced, few are reported and still fewer become law.

      4. The function of a committee of either house of Congress extends not merely to the sifting and amending of the bills referred to it, but to practically redrawing them, if the committee desires any legislation, or rejecting them by omitting to report them till near the end of the session if it thinks no legislation needed. Every committee is in fact a small bureau of legislation for the matters lying within its jurisdiction. It has for this purpose the advantage of time, of the right to take evidence, and of the fact that some of its members have been selected from their knowledge of or interest in the topics it has to deal with. On the other hand, it suffers from the nonpublication of its debates, and from the tendency of all small and secret bodies to intrigues and compromises, compromises in which general principles of policy are sacrificed to personal feeling or selfish interest. Bills which go in black or white come out gray. They may lose all their distinctive colour; or they may be turned into a medley of scarcely consistent provisions. The member who has introduced a bill may not have a seat on the committee, and may therefore be unable to protect his offspring. Other members of the House, masters of the subject but not members of the committee, can only be heard as witnesses. Although therefore there are full opportunities for the discussion of the bill by the committee, it often emerges in an unsatisfactory form, or is quietly suppressed, because there is no impetus of the general opinion of the House or the public to push it through. When the bill comes back to the House the chairman or other reporting member of the committee generally moves the previous question, after which no amendment can be offered. Debate ceases and the bill is promptly passed or lost. In the Senate there is a better chance of discussion, for the Senate, having more time and fewer speakers, can review to some real purpose the findings of its committees.

      5. As there is no debate on the introduction or on the second reading of a bill, the public is not necessarily apprised of the measures which are before Congress. An important measure is of course watched by the newspapers and so becomes known; minor measures go unnoticed.

      6. The general good nature of Americans, and the tendency of members of their legislatures to oblige one another by doing reciprocal good turns, dispose people to let any bill go through which does not injure the interest of a party or of a person. Such good nature counts for less in a committee, because a committee has its own views and gives effect to them. But in the House there are few views, though much impatience. The House has no time to weigh the merits of a bill reported back to it. Members have never heard it debated. They know no more of what passed in the committee than the report tells them. If the measure is palpably opposed to their party tenets, the majority will reject it; if no party question arises they usually adopt the view of the committee.

      7. What has been said already will have shown that except as regards bills of great importance, or directly involving party issues, there can be little effective responsibility for legislation. The member who brings in a bill is not responsible, because the committee generally alters his bill. The committee is little observed and the details of what passed within the four walls of its room are not published. The great parties in the House are but faintly responsible, because their leaders are not bound to express an opinion, and a vote taken on a nonpartisan bill is seldom a strict party vote. Individual members are no doubt responsible, and a member who votes against a popular measure, one for instance favoured by the working men, will suffer for it.² But the responsibility of individuals, most of them insignificant, half of them destined to vanish, like snowflakes in a river, at the next election, gives little security to the people.

      The best defence that can be advanced for this system is that it has been naturally evolved as a means of avoiding worse mischiefs. It is really a plan for legislating by a number of commissions. Each commission, receiving suggestions in the shape of bills, taking evidence upon them, and sifting them in debate, frames its measures and lays them before the House in a shape which seems designed to make amendment in details needless, while leaving the general policy to be accepted or rejected by a simple vote of the whole body. In this last respect the plan may be compared with that of the Romans during the Republic, whose general assembly of the people approved or disapproved of a bill as a whole, without power of amendment, a plan which had the advantage of making laws clear and simple. At Rome, however, bills could be proposed only by a magistrate upon his official responsibility; they were therefore comparatively few and sure to be carefully drawn. The members of American legislative commissions have no special training, no official experience, little praise or blame to look for, and no means of securing that the overburdened House will ever come to a vote on their proposals. There is no more agreement between the views of one commission and another than what may result from the fact that the majority in both belongs to the same party.

      Add to the conditions above described the fact that the House in its few months of life has not time to deal with one-twentieth of the many thousand bills which are thrown upon it, that it therefore drops the enormous majority unconsidered, though some of the best may be in this majority, and passes many of those which it does pass by a suspension of the rules which leaves everything to a single vote,³ and the marvel comes to be, not that legislation is faulty, but that an intensely practical people tolerates such defective machinery. Some reasons may be suggested tending to explain this phenomenon.

      Legislation is a difficult business in all free countries, and perhaps more difficult the more free the country is, because the discordant voices are more numerous and less under control. America has sometimes sacrificed practical convenience to her dislike to authority.

      The Americans surpass all other nations in their power of making the best of bad conditions, getting the largest results out of scanty materials or rough methods. Many things in that country work better than they ought to work, so to speak, or could work in any other country, because the people are shrewdly alert in minimizing such mischiefs as arise from their own haste or heedlessness, and have a great capacity for self-help.

      Aware that they possess this gift, the Americans have been content to leave their political machinery unreformed. Persons who propose comprehensive reforms are suspected as theorists and faddists. The national inventiveness, active in the spheres of mechanics and moneymaking, spends little of its force on the details of governmental methods, and the interest in material development tends to diminish the interest felt in politics. Nevertheless a certain change of attitude is evidenced by the much greater attention now given in the universities to the teaching of the principles and practice of government and administration.

      The want of legislation on topics where legislation is needed breeds fewer evils than would follow in countries like England or France where Parliament is the only lawmaking body. The powers of Congress are limited to comparatively few subjects: its failures are supposed seldom to touch the general well-being of the people, or the healthy administration