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IT must be accounted one of the notable facts in the history of the AngloSaxon race, and likewise in the annals of representative institutions, that the Government of the United States, formed originally for the needs and exigencies of three millions of people, inhabiting a narrow strip of seaboard, has remained without any material change for nearly a century, and is found to work as well for a nation now fifteen times as numerous, occupying a territory fifty times greater. Indeed, it may truthfully be said to work with less friction and more general satisfaction now than then. Its infancy was embroiled with controversies, respecting the interpretation of the Constitution, so fierce that the Union was more than once in real danger before it had come of age. Some of the States had to be dragged into the Federal compact, and others were threatening NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXX., No. 6

to go out long before the institution of slavery became a rock of offence between North and South.

The task of statesmanship during the first quarter of a century was not so much to make it work well, as to make it work at all. At the present time nobody looks upon a separation of the States as possible, and none desire it except a few straggling adherents of the Lost Cause, whose voice is as ineffectual and unheeded in the general movement, as that of the irate Tory at the creation of the world who demanded that chaos be preserved.

How far this contentedness with existing institutions is to be ascribed to material prosperity, how far to the excellence of the institutions themselves, and how far to the inherited Conservatism of the race, it would be futile to inquire. The country has advanced in wealth with

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great rapidity, notwithstanding temporary checks, during the whole period of the national existence; and few people desire to change their condition when they are well off. Apart from this, the Americans are at heart, and perhaps without knowing it themselves, among the most conservative peoples in the world. Although nobody is readier than the Yankee to devise and adopt new modes of doing things, and while the earth does not contain a more ubiquitous traveller or daring speculator, nobody offers a more angry resistance to any thing in the nature of organic change. The wicked persecution of the Abolitionists during a quarter of a century was part and parcel of the national tendency to cling to whatever is, for not one in twenty of the Northern people who participated in it, and voted with the slaveholders, had any pecuniary interest in slavery direct or indirect. The uprising in behalf of the Union was a conservative rather than an anti-slavery uprising. President Lincoln uttered the voice of the majority of the nation when he said that if he could save the Union by freeing all the slaves he would do that, and if he could save it by freeing none he would do that, and if he could save it by freeing some and not freeing others he would do that. Cath olic emancipation was carried in England half a century ago. It was not carried in the State of New Hampshire until a few years since, if indeed it has been fully effected even yet. The laws of Rhode Island regulating the Right of Suffrage were, until a recent period, as fantastic as those of England before the Reform Bill, and the States of Vermont and Connecticut are full of rotten boroughs to this day-each town electing one member of the legislature without regard to population.

It may be said that national vanity is accountable for this fixedness of attachment to national institutions. It is immaterial what name it is called by. The Conservatism of one country is most commonly vanity in the eyes of another. The English fondness for titles and a State Church is a preposterous vanity to Americans, and the rock-ribbed Conservatism of China is vanity to all the world else.

It makes no difference what name is given to the set of ideas which cause a

people to cling tenaciously to their own fashions. fashions. It remains a fact that the Americans are an extremely conservative people, while not desiring to be considered so.

To the great majority of Americans it is a matter of no consequence whence they derived their institutions-in what ancient quarry their forefathers digged. The popular Fourth of July conception is that they were invented, inade out of whole cloth, struck out at a heat; that they sprang into existence Minerva-like without gestation or heredity. It needs no professor of evolution to tell us that this kind of birth for a government as for an individual is impossible. Historically the American form of government is the British government of the last century with hereditary succession left out. I am speaking now of the form of government, and not of the machinery by which it is kept going; of the legislative, executive, and judicial processes, not of the distribution of the suffrage or the sources of power. The form King, Lords, and Commons was adopted not only for the Federal Government, but for each of the thirteen original States, and has been copied in regular succession by twenty-five additional States-King, Lords, and Commons without hereditary succession, and of limited tenure.

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Since the adoption of this form of government, far greater changes of substance have taken place in England than in America. The powers vested in the President, Senate, and House of Representatives, and in each of them, are no whit less now than they were under George Washington. Those of the Crown and the Lords are vastly less than they were under George III. So attenuated have these become, that it is a matter of dispute whether they have any direct powers left that can be successfully asserted against the Commons. Indirect powers they have, undoubtedly, of considerable magnitude and import, the greatest being the influence exercised by the Lords upon the elections of the Commons. This, however, is the influence of landownership rather than of lordship. The House of Lords a short time since rejected the Irish Volunteer Bill after its passage by the Commons. Possibly they may reject it a second

time, for it will surely come up again. But after its third passage by the Commons the Lords will pass it also, not because they will like it any better than before, but because they must. And so it would be with any other bill about which the Commons should show any decided purpose and determination. The Senate of the United States would reject any bill from the House which the majority of its members did not like -would reject it thirty times as easily as once. On the other hand, the House, finding its measure rejected once, would not pass it a second time until changes in the personnel of the Senate should give indications of a change in its temper.

The difference between the executive modes of the two countries is still more marked. Any measure which passes the Commons is supposed to have received the royal sanction in advance at the hands of her Majesty's Ministers, or failing that at the hands of her Majesty's Opposition, who straightway become Ministers. Hence the subsequent approval of the bill is a matter of form, and a matter of course. But the President of the United States would veto a bill without hesitation as many times, and under as many different forms and guises, as Congress should pass it—as President Hayes did during the recent session of Congress; and in so doing he would be sustained by public opinion as exercising a lawful discretion. The country might think the discretion erroneously exercised, but the right to exercise it would never be questioned. As a matter of fact nine tenths of all the executive vetoes in the annals of Congress have been salutary and conducive to the public weal; and probably the same proportion will hold good as to the vetoes of the State governors. The veto power is a conservative force which has nothing corresponding to it under existing English practice. The unqualified power of restraint which the Upper House exercises over the Lower in the United States is also one of the lost arts of government in the United Kingdom, and I suppose very few desire, and none expect, to see it restored.

The question whether the United States might usefully ingraft upon their system of government the principal improvement wrought in the English sys

tem since the separation of the two countries, has been a good deal discussed in pamphlets and on the rostrum of late years. Reduced to its simplest terms, the question is whether it would be wise for the United States to have one government like the House of Commons, upon which public opinion can impinge and concentrate readily and effectively, or three governments, to wit, President, Senate, and House of Representatives, upon which public opinion is dispersed and unable to act effectively except at certain periods fixed in the almanac, and even then not simultaneously upon all three-a question not so easily answered as this statement of it would seem to imply. To accomplish such a change it would be necessary to give the members of the Cabinet seats on the floor of Congress, to confide to them the initiative of the principal measures of legislation, to hold them collectively responsible for every thing, and to send them adrift whenever for any reason they should fail of the support of a majority of the popular branch of the legislature. Mechanical difficulties in the way of such an arrangement, which are very considerable if not insurmountable, will be noticed hereafter. An initial step has been proposed in the form of a bill in Congress by Senator Pendleton, of Ohio, which presents no difficulties at all except the difficulty of getting a majority to agree to it. The bill provides that seats shall be assigned to the Cabinet in both branches of Congress; that they shall be free to occupy them at all times, and required to be present at certain times to answer questions propounded to them, in the same way as her Majesty's Ministers are catechised by members of the House of Commons. The right to participate in general debate is not recorded by the bill, and the right to vote is denied by the Constitu

tion.

Looking at the general run of questions and answers in Parliament where members are at liberty to ask the Rt. Hon. Secretary of This what he thinks about the deterioration of the quality of Irish butter, and the Under-Secretary of That whether the survivors of Rorke's Drift have been allowed an extra flannel shirt and trousers as a reward for their

gallant conduct-two questions which,

with others of like gravity, were propounded in the writer's hearing at the sitting of the 16th June last-it would seem hardly worth the effort of passing Mr. Pendleton's bill in order to get so little as he offers to give. I have attended many spelling schools that were livelier and more entertaining. The right to join in general debate saves the Ministerial bench from becoming a mere class in conundrums. Indeed, it would seem impossible to draw a line between answers to questions and general debate thereon. In the greater number of cases where information is sought by the legislature concerning the acts of the executive, what is especially wanted is the reason for the act. When the head of a department is asked for his reasons for a particular line of action, he must be allowed to choose his own words and decide for himself how much time is needed for his explanations. It is impossible to open the mouths of the Cabinet in Congress, and close them at the same time. The Cabinet would probably decline to occupy the seats offered to them on such conditions, and the power to compel their attendance is at least doubtful.

Mr. Pendleton expressly disclaims the intention to introduce or even to pave the way for the English style of parliamentary government. The advantage he ascribes to his measure is that it would greatly facilitate and expedite the business of Congress to have the heads of the executive departments within reach, when information is wanted; and here it must be allowed that the argument on his side is strong. Under existing methods the procuring of information from a department for the use of the House is most cumbersome and dilatory. Some member of the House, on Resolution Day (which comes once a week), offers a resolution calling for it. The House may adopt the resolution or reject it, or refer it to a standing committee. In the latter case the committee can report it back when the committee is called in its order, which will happen about three times in the course of a session, the mover having meanwhile lost all responsibility for his resolution, and the committee having assumed it. Most commonly, however, the House adopts or rejects the resolution without

referring it. It is then engrossed by a clerk, signed, and certified, and conveyed by a messenger to the Secretary of the proper department, who refers it to a bureau where manuscript is accumulated upon it more or less. Then the answer is sent back to the Secretary, who takes time to consider whether the information ought to be given at all. Before it actually reaches the House all interest in it has perhaps evaporated, or if it be still alive, the time when it would have been most useful has gone by. It frequently happens, however, that some part of the desired information is wanting, or is furnished in such shape that it is unintelligible to the member who called for it, so that a supplementary resolution of inquiry must be sent through the same devious channel. By this time, probably, nobody cares whether the question is ever answered at all.

Evasion of the point of an interrogatory is not uncommon when the answer is communicated in writing. If the Secretary is reluctant to give the information, or if he wishes to puzzle a political adversary, or wear out his patience, or do any thing except deal frankly and openly with him, it is very easy to employ words which seem to answer but do not. Such trickery is impossible when the parties are brought face to face in an open court of two or three hundred practised dialecticians. A good illustration is found in the colloquy which took place in the House of Commons on the 14th August, when the Secretary for the Colonies was asked whether it was true that a price had been put on King Cetewayo's head. Of course the gravamen of such an inquiry was whether her Majesty's Government sanctioned assassination as a means of getting rid of an enemy in war. The Rt. Hon. Secretary replied that he did not know whether a price had been put on Cetewayo's head or not. He was evidently apprehensive that the thing had been done, and he hesitated to condemn the practice lest he should cast censure upon the Commander of the Forces in South Africa. The Opposition saw the opening, and rushed at it. After a brief skirmish the Chancellor of the Exchequer was fain to admit that assassination was an unjustifiable mode of warfare, and to pro

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