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VI

EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

WHEN viewed from the standpoint of comparative politics, American politics seem to be characterized by extreme irrationality. In every other civilized country the constitution provides means by which the administration can formulate its policy, propose measures to the legislature, and bring them to determination. This is the simple and rational order which is found in sound corporate management of every kind, large or small. Any one would be regarded as crazy who should seriously propose that the president of a company ought not to attend meetings of the directors, or that he ought not to have the right to prepare business for their consideration. But just such arrangements pervade the organization of public business in all spheres of government in the United States. It seems to be the quintessence of absurdity that the people should be put continually to great expense andeffort to elect presidents, governors, and mayors, as exponents of public policy, when, after all, those elected are not to have the opportunity of formulating public policy. It is going through a great deal to arrive at nothing definite or conclusive.

The remarkable thing is not that the system breeds corruption, but that it should work at all. Any one who will consider what would happen if such arrange

ments as exist in public business were applied to private business, will readily comprehend why graft pervades American politics. Fancy a railroad president trying to run his lines successfully while excluded from the directors' meetings at which allotments of funds and equipment are determined. No business man would expect anything else than that systematic jobbery would be the inevitable result. And yet the manage

United States is sub

ment of public business in the ject to just such conditions. It follows that extravagance, corruption, and graft are not adventitious in the American system of government; they are its natural concomitants.

This raises the problem: How did the United States acquire such a system? Certainly not by inheritance, for its characteristics are the reverse of those which appear in all other offshoots of the English constitutional stem. If the fact were not historically evident, no one could imagine that the governmental methods of the United States had any ancestry in common with those of the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Canada, and the Commonwealth of Australia. What, then, has been the cause of the great divergence in development? The case propounds an important problem to political science, but it is one that admits of ready solution, for in tracing back the divergence to its beginnings it appears that it originated in the separation of the executive department from the legislature. This is the peculiarity of the American system, which differentiates it from that of all other countries save those of Central and South America. If our House of Representatives is weak and ineffectual

as compared with other representative assemblies, it is also the case that our House of Representatives differs from all its congeners in that it lacks the presence of the Executive to add to its importance and enhance its prestige. During the controversy between the House of Representatives and President Roosevelt as to the supply of funds for the secret service, congressional leaders complained of their inability to reach the public ear with a statement of their side of the case. The fact was deplored that the conspicuous position occupied by the President gave a range to his utterance with which Congress could not compete.1 But it is clear that if the executive forum had been in the House itself, executive averment and the response thereto would have occupied a common center of interest, and it would have been impossible to focus observation upon the one without taking in the other.

The peculiar privation which our House of Representatives experiences was inflicted upon it by a doctrine that was powerfully influential during the period in which the United States began its career as an independent nation. It is the doctrine commonly known as the separation of the powers. In the form in which it became famous it was promulgated by the eighteenth-century French publicist, Montesquieu. It

1 A resolution was offered in the House to print for distribution 2,000,000 copies of the report of the proceedings of the House in reply to the President's charges, but it was defeated. In the course of debate, on January 14, 1909, Mr. Williams, the minority leader, said, "We knew when we took up the cudgels that the President threw down that he could get the ear of the country for a message, and that we could not get the ear of the country for speeches made in opposition."

is contained in Book XI of his "Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748.

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At present this doctrine survives only in the United States and the Spanish-American republics. It is dead everywhere else. France (1791) and Norway (1814) both adopted it in their national constitutions, but both after violent struggle and distress rejected it. In the eyes of European publicists it now possesses merely an antiquarian interest. Even such a voluminous work as the "Cambridge Modern History" curtly dismisses it as "an illusory theory" and as an "hallucination" that hindered the formation of agencies for the control of government by public opinion.1

At the time it was formulated, however, it met with an enthusiastic reception in England. At that time reformers were struggling to find means of counteracting the personal will of the monarch without impairing the public value of his office. This was eventually accomplished by arrangements giving the custody of Crown authority to a prime minister raised to power by the representatives of the people. If one is able to look through appearances into realities, it will be seen that in all English-speaking commonwealths the purport of a general election is the choice of a President; the essential difference lies in the way the President is treated after he is elected. By so much as his power of initiative is abridged, the sovereignty of the people is impaired. But in the eighteenth century the possibility of such a transfer of power from the basis of prerogative to the basis of popular control was not comprehended, and the aim proposed by reformers

1"Cambridge Modern History," Vol. VI, p. 811.

was to confine prerogative. It became the fashion to praise Montesquieu's theory of the English constitution, and from England the doctrine passed into the American colonies. In England its influence was exhausted in producing a transient phase of opinion; in America it was speedily translated into practice in the course of the constitution-making to which the states were committed as a result of the Revolution. The principle of the separation of the powers was explicitly recognized in six of the twelve state constitutions adopted prior to 1787, and enunciation of that doctrine has been a general characteristic of American state constitutions ever since. The Constitution of the United States is, however, a remarkable exception, for it does not contain any enunciation of that principle. The omission could not have been the result of inadvertence, as the framers of the Constitution diligently consulted the text of existing state constitutions, and had before them distinct assertions of that principle. The constitution of Maryland, adopted in 1776, declared that "the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government ought to be forever separate and distinct from each other." The Massachusetts constitution of 1780 asserts the same principle with more emphasis. Any such declaration is conspicuously absent from the federal Constitution. Moreover its provisions violate that principle, which indeed was one of the objections raised to the adoption of the Constitution. This objection is considered by Madison in Nos. 47 and 48 of The Federalist. The way in which he meets it is to point out that Montesquieu viewed the constitution of England as "the mirror of political

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