Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/658

638 d'état by a party which wanted to drive the Government to a dissolution. Any notion that a nominated Senate will be the serene abode of high character, or special knowledge, or commercial authority, such as shrinks from electoral contests, is belied by the experience of Canada, where the Senate is a mere infirmary for superannuated partisans, especially for such as have spent money for the party elections. Where the Senate is elective, and the authority of the nation is divided, in whatever proportions, between the two Houses, collision is certain to ensue, sooner or later; as it has in Victoria, as it did in France when, on the famous 16th of May, the country was in this manner brought to the verge of revolution. Collision is not the calm review of legislation, nor has it any tendency that way; its tendency is to political convulsions. Political convulsions are the almost inevitable result of an attempt to divide the national will and to make it manifest itself through two independent organs, sure soon, if it were only from corporate jealousy, to become antagonistic. Where harmony has been preserved, it has been due to the ascendency of the same party in both branches of the Legislature, a condition of things which is always precarious, while, if what has been said of the party system generally is true, that system can not be relied on as the sustaining or controlling force of any polity for the future. The whole theory of mechanical checks and balances, however consecrated, is unsound; it belongs to the times of jealousy between monarchs and their subjects; the hope of a commonwealth lies in the more genial policy of disposing all its members to the common wood. Methods of securing deliberate action may be devised in the interest of all; but no ingenuity can really devise a method of permanently dividing the national will and making it check itself.

To secure deliberate action, the first thing necessary is to have the wisest men of the country in that assembly which represents the will of the nation. But haste may be also prevented, and time given for reflection and for change of mind, by arrangement of the forms of legislation. It might be desirable even to confer a suspensive veto for a short period on a stated minority. Such an expedient would at least be more effective than the obsolete veto of the Crown, and less disturbing to the political frame than a collision between the Commons and the Lords, out of which the only way is a coercive dissolution of Parliament in the midst of a boiling agitation, or a swamping creation of Peers.

The question whether an individual chief of the state is necessary concerns most the American Republic. It is at present complicated by the exigencies of party, which requires a chief—as an army requires a general—though such a minister as Lord Aberdeen was hardly more than the president of a council. In Switzerland—an example which, for the reason already given, is always to be cited with reserve—there is only a titular President of the Federal Council,