strength, the immense increase of her good-humored inattention to detail all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to sacrifice holocausts of feelings, when the feelings were other people's. This conferred on her a kind of profanity, an absence of ceremony in her social relations which was both amusing, because it suggested that she would take what she gave, and formidable, because it was inconvenient and you might not care to give what she would take. "If you have n't got any art, it's not quite the same as if you did n't hide it, is it?" asked Basil Dashwood.

"That's right-say one of your clever things!" murmured Miriam, sweetly, to the young man.

"You're always acting," he answered, in English, with a laugh, while Sherringham remained struck with his expressing just what he himself had felt weeks before.

"And when you have shown them your termagant, to your public de là-bas, what will you do next?" asked Madame Carré.

"Constance and Juliet take care you don't mix them," said Sherringham.

"I want to be various. You once told me I had a hundred characters," Miriam replied.

"Ah, vous-en-êtes là?" cried the old actress. "You may have a hundred characters, but you have only three plays. I'm told that's all there are in English."

Miriam appealed to Sherringham. "What arrangements have you made? What do the people want?"

armies and pyramids, you know: we must n't be too heavy."

"Oh, I hate scenery!" sighed Miriam. "Elle est superbe," said Madame Carré. "You must put those pieces on the stage: how will you do it?"

"Oh, we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carré," Basil Dashwood responded, genially. "They put money on it, you know." "On it? But what do they put in it? Who will interpret them? Who will manage a style like that the style of which the verses she just repeated are a specimen? Whom have you got that one has ever heard of?"

66

Why then go out of the door to come in at the window? especially if you smash it! An English arrangement of a French piece is a pretty woman with her back turned."

"Do you really want to keep her?" Sherringham asked of Madame Carré, as if he were thinking for a moment that this after all might be possible.

She bent her strange eyes on him. "No, you are all too queer together; we could n't be bothered with you, and you're not worth it."

"I'm glad it's together; we can console each other."

66

He began the next moment to repeat to his new acquaintance some of the things he had been told in London; but their hostess stopped him off, waving the talk away with charming overdone stage horror and the young hands of the heroines of Marivaux. "Ah, wait till you go, for that! Do you sup

Henry James.

The Committee on Appropriations does not alone possess the right to report at any time. Other committees, notably the Ways and Means, enjoy the same privilege. But the bills providing for the public expenditures are regarded as so vital that the question of consideration can rarely be carried against one of them. The question of consideration gives to the majority of the House one of its few opportunities to overrule the plans of the little army of leaders. It may be raised against any measure, at the moment it is laid before the House. Even if the bill has been made a 66 cial order" for the day, the majority may determine that it shall not be considered on that day, and this may go on until some bill is reached upon which the majority is desirous of voting. Naturally, it is very seldom that there can be found a majority to vote against the con

spe

sideration of an appropriation bill. For this reason, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee has a great power of obstruction; for so long as he has one of his regular bills in hand he can interpose it against any motion that is obnoxious to him.

The filibuster is one of the most offensive products of our system of legislative procedure. He is the creature of a theory that the right to adjourn is one of the most sacred of parliamentary privileges, and that the motion to break up the sitting is always in order. There is also a tradition, of modern origin, that the rules are made to protect the minority from the encroachments of the majority. During the last session of the Fiftieth Congress, a Representative determined that a certain bill should have a hearing, and he proceeded to accomplish his object by preventing the transaction of all other public business until the leaders of the House came to an agreement with him. It was a most pitiable exhibition of the weakness of the popular branch of the American Congress. One man brought it to its knees and gained his will of it. This was bad enough, but he had been inspired by the opponents of the measure, who were in the minority, and who had, in their turn, filibustered to prevent its

consideration. It was in this unreasoning, discordant, and riotous way that the majority gained its end. But just before his triumph, those who subsequently became the worst-beaten victims of this man's obstructive tactics had delivered themselves of some extraordinary speeches. The Committee on Rules had reported a resolution, the object of which was to put an end to a certain species of filibustering. It provided that during the remainder of the session there should be no call of States for the introduction of bills and resolutions on the two Mondays of the month on which motions to suspend the rules may be made. The session was near its end. No bills introduced at that time could be considered even by the standing committees to which they would be referred. No report on them could be expected. They would not even find a place on the calendar, the grave of many measures that ought to be on the statute-book. Nevertheless, the resolution was defeated, because the filibusters of the House desired to retain the power to wear out the legislative suspension day, by introducing long bills which had been raked up from the dust covered documents of former Congresses, and demanding that the clerk should read them through. There is nothing so simple, nothing which necessitates so little exertion of the mind of the Congressman who resorts to it, and therefore nothing so brutal in the armory of the filibuster as this demand that bills shall be read at the clerk's desk in order that time shall be consumed. The most serious effect of the defeat of this resolution was the failure of the friends of the International Copyright Bill to secure a hearing.

It was during the debate on this resolution that the first victims of the action of the House made their extraordinary speeches. One would have thought, to hear them, that the Commons were VOL. LXIV.- NO. 381.

5

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still contending against the Crown's tyrannical claims of prerogative, and that the House of Representatives at Washington was the Commons' House. It was all so medieval and archaic, reminiscent of the darker days of English history, when the representatives of the people were buying privileges and immunities with the supply bills. The contention was that the right to pervert the rules of the House, and to prevent Congress from discharging its constitutional functions, is one of the muniments of our civil liberty, a governmental institution as unassailable as the Bill of Rights. The right to filibuster, so argued these alarmists, is essential to defend the minority from the encroachments of the majority; and the majority seemed to think the argument sound, and that in some mysterious way the minority would be persecuted, and that it would suffer from aggressive violence, if the rules of the House should be employed for the purpose of facilitating the transaction of business.

Toward the close of the last Congress, this minority, having years ago ceased to be in any sense political, came to consist of half a dozen men, or occasionally of only one or two; and these few men, desiring to defeat some legislation, or to weary the House into consenting to consider their measures, carried their objects by playing unworthy tricks with the rules; in a word, by committing the offense of filibustering. The filibuster, therefore, may secure an affirmative as well as a negative result. He can not only prevent the consideration of a measure which he may desire to defeat, but he can compel a hearing for his own schemes. It is true that only a few members of Congress will take the responsibility of filibustering for or against measures that are not partisan, but these few are very dangerous, especially if they are not carrying out the wishes of the people of the districts which they represent, as was true of some of the

More powerful, however, than the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, and generally than the filibuster, is the Speaker. He is in modern theory the leader of the majority party in the House, although in fact there is no real party leader in either branch of the Congress. Even the authority of the caucus has been weakened, if it has not been actually destroyed, by the persistent refusal of the protection Democrats to vote for the tariff bills which have been agreed to by the conclave of their party. But the Speaker comes nearer to leadership than any other member of the House, and he has an influence which is due not only to the fact that he is usually the real intellectual leader of his side of the House, but to the more substantial fact that he is possessed of a wealth of patronage which is not wholly exhausted by the appointment of the standing committees. He has a directive power over legislation that makes his friendship of great value to a member, while his enmity is something that very seriously damages the public career of any one who is so unfortunate as to incur it.

Precisely why the Speaker is so nearly absolute, and why he must continue to be so until our existing system of legislation is changed, can be appreciated only by a clear understanding of the constitution of the House. In the first place, as has been frequently pointed out by writers on Congress and its methods, there is no such leader in the House of Representatives as there is in the British House of Commons. We have no such institution as that which is known in England as "government," because our ostensible Executive is the real Executive, while one of our fundamental theories is that the two departments must be wholly independent of one another. This may be classed as an American fiction, and is quite on a

lie at the foundation of English constitutional law. We have no immediate personal representatives of the Executive in Congress, and no person or no body of persons charged with the duty of preparing and directing the legislation for which the political party in control of the House is to be held responsible.

The domination of the standing committees and the leadership of their chairmen have been severely criticised as destructive of debate and of wise deliberation in the House of Representatives. The committees have been called "little legislatures," and their influence for evil has been strongly dwelt upon. It is not within the province of the present article, however, to examine into the merits of that question. It is sufficient for our purpose to point out the existence of the committees, and their influence over the legislation of the House and the Speaker. Whether they could profitably be supplanted by some other supervisory power cannot be settled offhand. It is true that they divide responsibility, and are a source of weakness in some respects. On the other hand, they perform useful functions, generally very well, which would not be done at all unless the organization of the House should be revolutionized, and the subject-matter and the form of bills placed in the hands of some such arbitrary body as the British Cabinet. It is doubtless the fact that the prime cause of the difficulties of the House of Representatives, of its inability to accomplish its task satisfactorily, of its practical burial under the mass of business that cannot possibly be attended to, lies in the usurpation by Congress of jurisdiction over subjects which were not within the contemplation of the framers when they defined the powers and duties of the legislative branch of the government. Not only is the country larger than was dreamed of by the men of a hundred