Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/132

 7.

The Maker of Laws

In the United States, the general democratic tendency to crowd competent and self-respecting men out of the public service is exaggerated by a curious constitutional rule, unknown in any other country. This is the rule, embodied in Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of the Constitution and carried over into most of the State constitutions, that a legislator must be an actual resident of the district he represents. Its obvious aim is to preserve for every electoral unit a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect is to fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local politicians, many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to grasp the problems with which government has to deal. In England it is perfectly possible for the remotest division to choose a Morley to represent it, and this, in fact, until the recent rise of the mob, was not infrequently done. But in the United States every congressional district must find its representative within its own borders, and only too often there is no competent