Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/650

630 the great questions are virtually decided, parliamentary speeches being little more than reproductions of arguments already used outside the House, and parliamentary divisions little more than registrations of public opinion. It is not easy to say how far, with the spread of public education, this process may go, or what value the parliamentary debate and division list will in the end retain. If monarchy is primeval, parliaments are the offspring of the middle ages, and for them too the sand in the hour-glass of history runs. But this is a problem which belongs to the future.

At present party it is that governs, though under different sets of forms. In England it governs under the forms of King, Lords, and Commons; in the United States under the forms of President, Senate, and House of Representatives, together with the State Executives and Legislatures. In England and the United States alike it is supreme. It elects the members of all the Legislatures, since it controls the nominations, without which no candidate can go with a chance of success to the poll. It appoints the executive, which is a committee of its leaders, and the composition of which always depends on the fortunes of the party conflict; it supplies the working organization of the Legislature, a reorganization of which in England or elsewhere will be attempted in vain without a solution of this preliminary question. Why is it that the work of De Tocqueville, with all its philosophy and its literary beauty, is practically so little instructive and so seldom quoted in the United States? Because he studied the forms, not the forces, which are the parties. Why is it that the Senate of the United States, designed specially to embody the federal principle, while the House of Representatives embodied the federal and national principle, has not corresponded in action to that design? Because the same parties control both Houses and the State government at the same time. Congress, in truth, is now little more than a place for formally ratifying and recording the decisions at which the party having the majority has arrived in caucus, where the only real deliberation takes place. As the minority in caucus is bound by party law to vote with the majority in the legislative hall, it often happens that a small minority of the whole Legislature passes a law or carries an election. Take away party, and we see that the whole of the present system of parliamentary government would crumble. We have, then, at once to ask what party is; upon what basis of reason or public morality it rests, and whether it can last. Burke says:

Party is a body united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle on which they are all agreed. For my part I find it impossible to conceive that any one believes in his own politics or thinks them to be of any weight who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means toward those ends, and to employ