While the House of Commons has assumed the supervision of the whole Executive Government, it has turned over to the Executive Government the most important part of the business of legislation. For it is in the Cabinet that the effective work of legislation begins. The Ministers, hardly recruited from the now very serious fatigues of a Session which lasts all but to the commencement of September, assemble in Cabinet in November, and in the course of a series of meetings, extending over rather more than a fortnight, determine what legislative proposals are to be submitted to Parliament. These proposals, sketched, we may believe, in not more than outline, are then placed in the hands of the Government draftsman; and, so much is there in all legislation which consists in the manipulation of detail and in the adaptation of vaguely conceived novelties to pre-existing law, that we should not probably go far wrong if we attributed four-fifths of every legislative enactment to the accomplished lawyer who puts into shape the Government Bills. From the measures which come from his hand, the tale of Bills to be announced in the Queen's Speech is made up, and at this point English legislation enters upon another stage.

The American political parties of course support and oppose particular legislative measures. They are elated at the success of a parlicular Bill, and disappointed by its failure. But no particular consequences beyond disappointment follow the rejection of a Bill. The Government of the country goes on as before. In England it is otherwise. Every Bill introduced into Parliament by the Ministry (and we have seen that all the really important Bills are thus introduced) must be carried through the House of Commons without substantial alteration, or the Ministers will resign, and consequences of the gravest kind may follow in the remotest parts of an empire extending to the ends of the earth. Thus a Government Bill has to be forced through the House of Commons with the whole strength of party organization, and in a shape very closely resembling that which the Executive Government gave to it. It should then in strictness pass through a searching discussion in the House of Lords; but this stage of English legislation is becoming merely nominal, and the judgment on it of the Crown has long since become a form. It is therefore the Executive Government which should be credited with the authorship of English legislation. We have thus an extraordinary result. The nation, whose constitutional practice suggested to Montesquieu his memorable maxim concerning the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial powers, has in the course of a century falsified it. The formal Executive is the true source of legislation; the formal

1

Legislature is incessantly concerned with Executive Govern

ment.

After its first birth, nothing can be more equable, and nothing can be more plain to observation, than the course of an American legislative measure. A Bill, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, goes through an identical number of stages of about equal length. When it has passed both Houses, it must still commend itself to the President of the United States, who has a veto on it which, though qualified, is constantly used, and is very difficult to overcome. An English Bill begins in petty rivulets or stagnant pools. Then it runs underground for most of its course, withdrawn from the eye by the secrecy of the Cabinet. Emerging into the House of Commons, it can no more escape from its embankments than the water of a canal; but, once dismissed from that House, it overcomes all remaining obstacles with the rush of a cataract, and mixes with the trackless ocean of British institutions.

The very grave dangers entailed on our conntry by this eccentric method of legislation arise from its being followed, not only in the enactment of ordinary laws, but in the amendment of what, if it be still permitted to us to employ the word, is called the British Constitution. 'En Angleterre,' writes De Tocqueville, 'la Constitution peut changer sans cesse ; ou plutôt elle n'existe pas.' There are doubtless strong Conservative forces still surviving in England; they survive because, though our political institutions have been transformed, the social conditions out of which they originally grew are not extinct. But of all the infirmities of our Constitution in its decay, there is none more serious than the absence of any special precautions to be observed in passing laws which touch the very foundations of our political system. The nature of this weakness, and the character of the manifold and elaborate securities which are contrasted with it in America, may be well illustrated by considering two measures, of whose relative right to precedence in the counsels, not indeed of Parliament, but of the Government, we have heard much recently-the Reform of the London Corporation, and the group of deeply penetrating political changes known by the inadequate name of the County Franchise Bill. The reconstruction of the London Municipality, though a very difficult undertaking, would belong in America to the ordinary State legislatures. The legislature of New York State has, in fact, several times attempted to remodel the municipality of New York City, which has repeatedly shown itself to be corrupt, unmanageable, and inefficient; and these attempts call for no special remark, except that they have hitherto met

with only the most moderate success. But a measure distantly resembling the suggested English County Franchise Bill* would be, both from the point of view of the several States and from the point of view of the United States, a Constitutional amendment. In the least considerable, the least advanced, and the most remote American State, its enactment would have to be coupled with carefully devised precautionary formalities. If the most usual of these were observed, a law would be passed by the ordinary State legislature providing that, at some future day, a special assembly should be elected to consider the proposed innovations; and this 'Convention,' as it is commonly called, would discuss this one subject and none other, and in all probability would only be empowered to make such changes as two-thirds, or even three-fourths, of its members agreed upon. If an American County Franchise Bill were proposed to be enforced by Federal authority, the designed difficulty of carrying it would be vastly greater. As a rule, the Federal Constitution does not interfere with the franchise; it leaves the right of voting to be regulated by the several States, gradually and locally, according to the varying circumstances of each, and the political views prevailing in it. But the rule has now been departed from in the new Article, securing the suffrage to the negroes; and there is no question that, if a measure were contemplated in America, bearing to the entirety of Ame rican institutions the same relation which the so-called County Franchise Bill bears to the entirety of ours,-nay, even if a simple change in the franchise had to be introduced into all the States, or into the bulk of them, simultaneously-the object could only be effected by an amendment of the Constitution of the United States. It would therefore have to be dealt with under the Fifth Article of the Constitution. This article, which is the keystone of the whole Federal fabric, runs as follows:

'The Congress, whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution; or, on the application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three-fourths thereof, as one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress.'.

The mode, therefore, of proceeding with a measure requiring

*The Chancellor of the Exchequer, fresh from the discussion of this Bill in the Cabinet, placed it (at Pontefract on Dec. 5, 1883) at the head of three measures which he described as the most important which had been passed since 1689, the grand epoch of modern English Constitutional history.

an amendment of the Constitution would be this. First of all, the Senate of the United States and the House of Representatives must resolve, by a two-thirds majority of each Chamber, that the proposed amendment is desirable. The amendment has then to be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States. Now, there are at the present moment thirtyeight States in the American Union. The number of legislatures which must join in the ratification is therefore twentynine. We believe, however, that there is no State in which the Legislature does not consist of two Houses, and we arrive therefore at the surprising result that, before a constitutional measure of the gravity of the English County Franchise Bill could become law in the United States, it must have at the very least in its favour the concurring vote of no less than fifty-eight separate legislative chambers, independently of the Federal Legislature, in which a double two-thirds majority must be obtained. The alternative course permitted by the Constitution, of calling separate special Conventions of the United States and of the several States, would prove probably in practice even lengthier and more complicated.

The great strength of these securities against hasty innovation has been shown beyond the possibility of mistake by the actual history of the Federal Constitution. On March 4, 1789, the day fixed for commencing the operation of the new Federal Government, the Constitution had been ratified by all the States then established, except three. One of the first acts of the new Congress was to propose to the States, on September 25, 1789, a certain number of amendments on comparatively unimportant points, which had no doubt been suggested by the discussions on the draft-Constitution, and the several States ratified these amendments in the course of the following year. An amendment of more importance, relating to the power of the Supreme Court, was declared to have been ratified on September 5, 1794; and another, remedying a singular inconvenience which had disclosed itself in the original rule regulating the election of the President and of the Vice-President, had its ratification completed in September 1804. After these early amendments, which were comparatively easy of adoption through the small number of the original States, there was no change in the Federal Constitution for sixty years. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which became part of the Constitution in the period between the beginning of 1865 and the beginning of 1870, were the fruits of the conquest of the South by the North. They abolish slavery, provide against its revival, forbid the abridgment of the right to vote on the

ground of race or colour, impose penalties on the vanquished adherents of the seceding States, and incidentally give a constitutional guarantee to the Public Debt of the Federation. But they could not have been either proposed or ratified, if the South had not lain under the heel of the North. The military forces of the United States controlled the Executive Governments of the Southern States, and virtually no class of the population, except the negroes, was represented in the Southern Legislatures. The War of Secession, which was itself a war of Revolution, was in fact succeeded by a Revolutionary period of several years, during which not only the institutions of the Southern States, but the greater part of the Federal institutions were more or less violently distorted to objects not contemplated by the framers of the Constitution. But the form of the Federal institutions was always preserved, and they gradually recovered their reality, until at the present moment the working of the Constitution of the United States does not, save for the disappearance of negro slavery, differ from the mode of its operation before the civil convulsion of 1861-65.

The powers and disabilities attached to the United States and to the several States by the Federal Constitution, and placed under the protection of the deliberately contrived securities we have described, have determined the whole course of American history. That history began, as all its records abundantly show, in a condition of society produced by war and revolution, which might have condemned the great Northern Republic to a fate not unlike that of her disorderly sisters in South America. But the provisions of the Constitution have acted on her like those dams and dykes which strike the eye of the traveller along the Rhine, controlling the course of a mighty. river which begins amid mountain torrents, and turning it into one of the most equable water-ways in the world. The English Constitution, on the other hand, like the great river of England, may perhaps seem to the observer to be nowadays always more or less in flood, owing to the crumbling of the banks and the water poured into it from millions of drain-pipes. The observation is, however, worth making, that the provisions of the Constitution of the United States which have most influenced the destinies of the American people are not always those which the superficial student of it would first notice. Attention is easily attracted by Article IV., section 4, which makes the United

*The work of Mr. Louis J. Jennings on 'Republican Government in the United States' has much historical interest, containing, as it does, a striking account of the perversion of the Constitution during this revolutionary interval, now brought to a close.