Coll. Ffantleroy be suspended until to-morrow morning, when, upon his submission, he may be admitted." The record says that the next morning, Coll. Ffantleroy, acknowledging his error, was readmitted, and the order for suspension raised. Speakership contests are public misfortunes and private calamities inevitable as long as the Speakership is a stepping-stone to higher honors, and is of itself a means for the exercise of great political power. If the conditions did no more than spur honorable ambition, they would serve a useful purpose, but the concomitant evils are genuinely harmful to the public welfare and should be remedied. A mitigating expedient is the provision that has been in the Alabama Constitution since 1867, by which Presidents of the Senate and Speakers of the House hold office until their successors are elected and qualified. CHAPTER XXI LEADERSHIP LEADERSHIP is the legislative theme most prolific of fault-finding. All except those who lead, scold about leadership, Some say there is too much, some say there is too little. When there is plenty, most men prefer less. When it is scarce, most men prefer more. They rarely know just what they want, but know they do not want what they have. Sometimes the critic will argue both ways almost in the same breath. Thus Professor James H. Hyslop, on page 42 of his book on "Democracy," tells us it is our failure to analyze the problem and to break away from the authority of Aristotle which prevents us from discovering the fundamental principle that has moved political history. Aristotle's principle of classification was not philosophical, but historical, and based the organization of government upon the number of persons who shall participate therein. "I must contend," says Hyslop, "that this is wholly false for any scientific or philosophic purposes. It is not the quantity of men, but the quality of them that determines whether we shall have good government or not." Then, on page 127, he reproaches our Legislatures because the majority maintain silence against all reason and vote submissively in obedience to a "boss," or they open their mouths only to obstruct legislation and to make a "strike." "The consequence is that our assemblies have come to the pass where they must either cease to be deliberative bodies and put themselves under the 'sovereign' power of the Speaker, a pretty pass for democracy, or place themselves at the mercy of the unscrupulous minority." There is no escape, he says, from the autocratic powers of the Speaker, and the worse tyranny of the Legislature, except the referendum. In other words, because in a Legislature quality controls quantity, there should be escape to the referendum, of which the quintessence is the quantity idea. In our forty-eight State Legislatures may be found every shade of belief as to the importance of leadership and organization, running from Massachusetts, where it is actually obnoxious, where measures are actually endangered by the suspicion that there is preconcerted action behind them, to States where the leader of the House, by signals given with his pencil tapped on his desk, directs the votes of his partisans. Personally, if I had to choose between either extreme, I should prefer that of Massachusetts, but why should this blind me to the rational arguments in favor of deliberately matured plans and responsible leadership? -- one These arguments have been advanced by many thoughtful men. It will here suffice to give the views of two of them the foremost English critic of governmental institutions, the other that American who, by precept and example, first as writer and teacher, then as Governor and President, has more than any other man of our day influenced thought on the deeper problems of political science. James Bryce said in his great book on the "American Commonwealth": "A deliberative assembly is, after all, only a crowd of men; and the more intelligent a crowd is, so much the more numerous are its volitions; so much greater the difficulty of agreement. Like other crowds, a legislature must be led and ruled. Its merit lies not in the independence of its members, but in the reflex action of its opinion upon the-leaders, in its willingness to defer to them in minor matters, reserving disobedience for the issues in which some great principle overrides both the obligation of deference to established authority and the respect due to special knowledge." And to the New York Bar Association in 1908 he declared: "To secure the pushing forward of measures needed in the public interest, there should be in every legislature arrangements by which some definite person or body of persons becomes responsible for the conduct of legislation." Woodrow Wilson, writing on "Congressional Government" in 1885, observed: "We have in this country no real leadership; because no man is allowed to direct the course of Congress, and there is no way of governing the country save through Congress, which is supreme." The same thought appears in "An Old Master and other Essays" (p. 136): "We have no one in Congress who stands for the Nation. Each man stands for his part of the Nation; and so management and combination, which may be effected in the dark, are given the place that should be held by centered and responsible leadership, which would of necessity work in the focus of the national gaze." When he became President, he found that the supremacy he had accredited to Congress was not insuperable. What Congress lacked in centered and responsible leadership, he was strong enough to supply. The doctrine he had so long preached was applied in practical result, even though no rule of Congress was changed. It will be noticed that as far as their beliefs are disclosed by these quotations, Lord Bryce and Mr. Wilson seem to differ in that the English critic would permit revolt against leadership in matters involving great principles, but that the American critic, extolling the responsible leadership which works in the focus of the national gaze, allows us to infer he would have leadership always dominant, and held in check by responsibility. Whether or not Mr. Wilson would maintain that the leader should receive implicit and continuous obedience, at any rate such a view would be consistent with his well-known approval of the English Cabinet system, where the first refusal to obey the leader has the effect of discarding him, or at any rate of referring to the electorate the question of continuing him in power, and if the voters decide he is to go on, they show it by electing a majority that will obey. Presumably Lord Bryce would approve this, the system of his country, so that after all no radical difference between them would remain. The prevailing American theory has been otherwise. We have held that leaders were not discredited if occasionally disobeyed. Of our fathers, many were wont to do their own thinking. Their battle for political independence was the fruit of widespread personal independence, the natural product of conditions in a land of pioneers. The struggle for liberty intensified the dread of oneman power. Liberty brought democracy in its train, and the early years of the Republic saw the aristocrat shorn of his strength. This, however, was a revolt against human nature, and in extreme form could not survive. Men may be born equal in natural rights, if such there be, but they are not born equal in natural capacities. Goethe was brutally frank but not wholly wrong when he defined a majority as "a few strong men who lead, some knaves who temporize, and the weak multitude who follow, without the faintest idea of what they want." 1 Watch any gathering and see how instinctive and inevitable it is for much the larger part to turn to a few for counsel and direction. From all the lawmaking bodies of the world were you to pick out the one with the nearest approach to equality, would it not be the Senate of the United States? Where else A Century of Revolution, 187. would you expect so much of self-reliance, independence, individuality? Yet George F. Hoar tells in his "Autobiography" (1, 195) that when Senator Edmunds left the Senate, he said the whole work of the Senate was done by six men. With Mr. Hoar we may not suppose Mr. Edmunds meant the number six to be taken literally, but it suggests the small compass of actual power that even the Senate develops. Do not for a moment imagine such a state of affairs is due to political degeneracy. There is nothing whatever of novelty in it. James Madison, speaking in the Virginia Convention June 11, 1788, defended the competency of the Congress under the proposed Federal Constitution to lay taxes wisely, by citing the experience of the Virginia Legislature in entrusting decision to a few of its members. "Our Assembly," he said, "consists of considerably more than a hundred; yet, from the nature of the business, it devolves on a much smaller number. It is, through their sanction, approved of by all the others. It will be found that there are seldom more than ten men who rise to high information on this subject." In all assemblies in all times such has been the normal situation. Were this not the case, our American legislative system would have met with disaster long ere this. The leadership of the few has mitigated the harm threatened by rotation of membership. This has been overlooked by some of the critics. For instance, John Ordronaux says: "As the members of these Legislatures annually give place to newcomers without experience, it seems impossible not to realize the fact that, unless we believe the science of legislation to be intuitional, there is a logical necessity for concluding that ignorance and incompetency must in the majority of instances prevail over wisdom and experience." 2 That as a matter of fact this does not take place in the majority of instances is due to the leadership of the small number of men with wisdcm and experience who actually control. The real danger lies in the perversion of leadership. There is always the chance that when exaggerated into dictatorship, it will become selfish and even corrupt. Fortunately the danger breeds its own remedy. As a rule the abuse of power leads to revolt. Then the pendulum may swing toward the other extreme, which means anarchy if reached. Congress has shown itself capable 1 Elliot's Debates, 111, 254. • Constitutional Legislation in the U.S., 563. |