BRYCE'S AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH.

THI

Its

HIS is a great work, worthy of heartiest praise. strength does not lie in its style, although that, while lacking distinction, is eminently straightforward and clear; nor yet altogether in its broad scope of weighty topics, a scope wide almost beyond precedent in such subjects, and rich in suggestion, but chiefly in its method and in its point of view. Mr. Bryce does not treat the institutions of the United States as experiments in the application of theory, but as quite normal historical phenomena to be looked at, whether for purposes of criticism or merely for purposes of description, in the practical, every-day light of comparative politics. He seeks to put American institutions in their only instructive setting namely, of comparative institutional history and life.

that,

It is of course inevitable to compare and contrast what Mr. Bryce has given us in these admirable volumes with de Tocqueville's great Democracy in America. The relations which the two works bear the one to the other are almost altogether relations of contrast, and the contrast serves to make conspicuous the peculiar significance of what Mr. Bryce has written. De Tocqueville came to America to observe the operation of a principle of government, to seek a well-founded answer to the question: How does democracy work? Mr. Bryce, on the other hand, came, and came not once but several times, to observe the concrete phenomena of an institutional development, into which, as he early perceived, abstract political theory can scarcely be said to have entered as a formative force. The question for which he sought an answer was this: What sort of institutions have the English developed in America? In satisfaction of his curiosity, his keen and elevated philosophical desire, de Tocqueville saw the crude and impatient democracy of Andrew Jackson's time. Mr. Bryce has seen the almost full grown, the measurably sobered America of to-day, and has seen, therefore, with a fairer chance of just proportion.

It will hardly be accounted a disparagement of Mr. Bryce's style to say that it is inferior to de Tocqueville's; the thoughts it has to convey, the meanings it has to suggest belong to quite another class than that to which de Tocqueville's judgments must be assigned: it is not meant to carry the illumination of philosophical conceptions into the regions of fact which it explores; its task is rather exposition than judgment. Mr. Bryce does not feel called upon to compete with de Tocqueville in the field in which de Tocqueville is possibly beyond rivalry. Something very different was needed, and that he has done to admiration he has written a book invaluable to students of comparative politics, invaluable because of its fulness, its accuracy, its candor, its sane, perhaps I ought rather to say its sage, balance of practical judgment.

Mr. Bryce's qualifications for the great task he has thus worthily performed were probably equal to those of any other man of our generation. First of all, he is a Roman lawyer

steeped in the legal and political conceptions of that race whose originative strength in the field of law and practical sagacity in the field of politics were as conspicuous and as potent in the ancient world as the legal capacity and political virility of the English race are in the modern world. His knowledge of Roman institutions constantly serves to remind him of the oldness and persistency of certain features of institutional development, to warn him against perceiving novelty where it does not exist. In the second place, he is a member of Parliament and an English constitutional statesman, knowing the parent stock from which our institutions sprang, not only through study, but also through having himself tasted of its present fruits. Perhaps no one can so readily understand our institutions as an English public man sufficiently read in our history and our constitutional law not to expect to find bishops in our Senate or prime ministers in the presidency. He has breathed the air of practical politics in the country from which we get our habits of political action; and he is so familiar with the machinery of government at home as to be able to perceive at once the most characteristic differences, as well as the real

resemblances, between political arrangements in England and in the United States. He is prepared to see clearly, almost instinctively, the derivation of our institutions, at the same time that he is sure to be struck by even our minor divergences from English practice. But Mr. Bryce brought to the task of judging us a wider and more adequate preparation than even a schooling in Roman law and English practice could by itself have supplied. He is sufficiently acquainted with the history and practical operation of the present constitutions of the leading states of Europe to be able readily to discern what, in American practice, is peculiar to America, or to America and England, what common to modern political experience the world over. In brief, he has a comprehensive mastery of the materials of comparative politics, and great practical sagacity in interpreting them.

Mr. Bryce divides his work into six parts. In Part I he discusses "The National Government," going carefully over the ground made almost tediously familiar to American constitutional students by commentaries without number. But he gives to his treatment a freshness of touch and a comprehensiveness which impart to it a new and first-rate interest. This he does by combining in a single view both the legal theory and interpretation and the practical aspects and operation of the federal machinery. More than that, he brings that machinery and the whole federal arrangement into constant comparison with federal experiments and constitutional machinery elsewhere. There is a scope and an outlook here such as render his critical expositions throughout both impressive and stimulating. Congress, the presidency, and the federal courts are discussed in every point of view that can yield instruction. The forms and principles of the federal system are explained both historically and practically and are estimated with dispassionate candor. Perhaps the most emphasized point made in this part is one which is derived from comparative politics. It is the separation of the executive from Congress, a separation which deprives the executive of all voice in the formation of administrative and financial policy, and which deprives Congress of such leader

ship as would give its plans coherency and make available for its use that special and intimate knowledge of administrative possibilities without which much well-meant legislation must utterly miscarry. This is of course the particular in which our government differs most conspicuously from all the other governments of the world. Everywhere else there is one form or another of ministerial leadership in the legislature. A body of ministers constitutes, as it were, a nerve centre, or rather a sensitive presiding brain, in the body politic, taking from the nation such broad suggestions as public opinion can unmistakably convey touching the main ends to be sought by legislation and policy, but themselves suggesting in turn, in the light of their own special knowledge and intimate experience of affairs, the best means by which those ends may be attained. Because we are without such legislative leadership we remain for long periods of embarrassment without any solution of some of the simplest problems that await legislation. To this absence of cabinet government in America, and the consequent absence of party government in the European sense of the term, Mr. Bryce again and again returns as to a salient feature, full of significance both for much evil and for some good.2 The evil consists in slipshod, haphazard, unskilled and hasty legislation; the good, so far as it may be stated in a single sentence, consists in delaying the triumphs of public opinion and thereby, perhaps, rendering them safer triumphs.

One chapter of this first part possesses conspicuous merit, namely, chapter xxiii, on "The Courts and the Constitution." 8 It brings out with admirable clearness the wholly normal character of the function of constitutional interpretation, as a function familiar from of old to English judicial practice in the maintenance of charter provisions, and of course necessary, according to English precedents and ideas, to the maintenance and application of charter-like written constitutions. In exposition of

1 See especially vol. ii, pp. 316, 317.

2 See particularly vol. i, chap. xxv: Comparison of the American and European Systems.

3 Vol. i, pp. 237-255.

this view, now universally held but not always lucidly explained, he gives a prominence such as it has never before had to the very instructive fact that the constitution does not grant the power of constitutional interpretation to the federal courts in explicit terms, but that that power, so marvelled at by Eurcpeans, is simply a necessary inference (at least a necessary English inference) from its general provisions touching the functions of a federal judiciary. One point touching the action of the courts is, however, left perhaps a little too much to this same English inference. It is stated that cases involving questions of constitutionality must wait to be made up in the ordinary manner at the initiative of private parties suing in their own interest and are often, most often, decided at the instance and in behalf of such private litigants; but it is left too much to inference—an inference easy of course to an American, but doubtless far from obvious to a foreigner - that a decision, when against the constitutionality of a law, is, not that the law is null and void, but is that the law will not be enforced in that case. Therefore other cases involving the same points will not be made up, litigants knowing what to expect, and it is thus, indirectly, that the desired annulment is effected. This is not a matter of form merely or only of curious interest. For Mr. Bryce's purpose it is a point of importance. It illustrates the thesis he is trying to establish, namely, the normality of the whole principle and procedure: the entire absence from our system of any idea of a veto exercised by the courts upon legislation or of any element of direct antagonism between Congress and the judiciary, and the matter-of-course interpretation of the supreme law by those who interpret all law.

The appendix to Volume I adds to this first part, besides much other illustrative matter, a statement of the main features of the federal structure of the two great English universities and the federal constitution of Canada.

Here for

Part II is devoted to "The State Governments." the first time in any comprehensive treatise the states are given the prominence and the careful examination which they have always deserved at the hands of students of our institutions