face of the executive they were recognized as a power independent but watched and sometimes threatened. By the side of their will was the separate will of the government, and it was felt that the second should have the direction of the first. To-day the situation is reversed. It is no longer a question of seeking in the collection of precedents for tactics capable of preventing a government from laying siege to the chambers. The chambers are themselves the government. Before acting, the ministers try to penetrate the intentions of the majority; it is not their programme to guide those whom the electors have chosen, and the whole secret of their tenure of office is found in the degree of their skill in catching the lessons of the votes.1

As far back as 1840, Thiers, in a letter to Guizot, described the effects of the predominance of a legislature in ministers pale, hesitating, without avowed principles, without other pretensions than to live from day to day, without any point of support except universal lassitude and discouragement, reduced to efface themselves on all important occasions, to protect themselves by continual complaisance, now towards the king, now towards the Chamber and each fraction of the Chamber great and small, and to manufacture for themselves every morning an artificial majority by concessions or compliments, by promises and caresses, by weighing in scales of spiders' webs the number of situations which they have distributed in the Post-office on the one hand and the Tobacco Department on the other.2

And the Journal des Débats at the same time described the ministry

as going from Left to Right and Right to Left in the same hour; as having neither plan nor system nor will nor majority anywhere. It is a perpetual solicitor of contrary votes. It buys a success only by making concessions of principle to the Right, and voting with the Left.2

These accounts will answer equally for the monarchy with its extremely limited electorate and for the Third Republic with its universal suffrage.

From this preponderance of the legislature, again, results the Socialism which forms such a large element in modern

1 Eugène Pierre, op. cit., Introduction.

2 Thureau-Dangin, "History of the Monarchy of July," Vol. IV., pp. 107, 151.

politics, and appears so especially threatening in France. A strong executive, relying upon the support of a national public opinion, would have sufficient confidence in itself to repress local disorder and violence. On the other hand, a legislature made up of a large number of local representatives will be paralyzed. The member from the district in which the disorder occurs will be at the mercy of the violent element, while the members from other districts will reason that it is not their business to take care of his district, and will be quite sufficiently occupied with anxiety about their own, and all alike will be jealous of executive action.

A short account of the fall of the ministry of M. Casimir Périer in May, 1894, will serve as a sample of similar A certain M. Toussaint appears as a type of many deputies,

events.

who belong not to their district, but to suffering humanity, and their intervention generally has for its object, or at any rate for its result, to prolong human suffering. Having gone to Trignac to stimulate a strike and been arrested at the head of a crowd of rioters, he pleaded his exemption as a deputy and was discharged by the government official, while his followers were proceeded against. M. Périer, however, placed the officer on the retired list and asked the Chamber for authority to prosecute M. Toussaint. It was accorded by a majority of sixty-five. Since his accession on December 3, 1893, Périer has been regarded as one of the strongest ministers who have been in power, being very rich, indifferent to office, and resolute to obstinacy. Such support, added to his previous resistance to Socialist attacks, seemed most hopeful for the future. A week later his Minister of Public Works was asked whether he had allowed delegates of the employees of the state railways to attend meetings of a railway workmen's union. Replying in the negative, he was attacked by a Socialist leader and defeated in two votes, first by a majority of thirty-four and then of twenty-eight. The ministry at once resigned, and the President was called upon to form the thirty-second government which has held office in little more than twenty years, applying first to an ex-minister, who refused the thankless task of trying to govern Parliament with out a majority and without the power of dissolution.1

1 London Spectator, May 26, 1894.

Pointing to the probability of a government of Socialists, the same journal observed:

Naturally the funds fell, and all who are interested in order are shaking in their shoes, believing that the government will be in reality, if not in name, a government of anti-capitalists. It is therefore more than probable that as a consequence of the fall of M. Périer the "Red Spectre will be abroad again with the usual result, a passionate desire in the minds of the majority to find protection from the Chamber in the authority of some strong man, or some change in the constitution which shall greatly strengthen the hands of the executive.

Again:

Why the French Chamber, when freely elected, is always more violent than the electors who send it up is a fact which no one within our knowledge has ever explained or denied. Why, again, a majority of property holders in possession of the vote, electing the President indirectly and holding control through him of all physical force, are so madly afraid of an anti-social minority is as inexplicable to outsiders as it is to those who have written the history of 1848, 1852, and of the Parisian Commune.

It seems a simple explanation and quite sufficient for all these periods referred to, that a legislature left to itself and without authoritative leaders is nothing more nor less than a mob, and that all mobs, through their want of concert of action and of mutual confidence, and through the prevalence of mutual distrust and suspicion, are always at the mercy of the most violent and reckless portion and those who have nothing to lose. The mass of the voters suffers from precisely the same difficulties as the legislature, and the only remedy in both cases lies in a strong individual executive head, endowed with full power to govern but restrained by public responsibility to both.

Do you think that in a parliament the question of a majority is only a question of arithmetic? In politics, as in war, the number is nothing when the combatants of the same army or of the same party do not feel each other's elbows. If you take three thousand or four thousand men and put knapsacks on their backs and guns on their

shoulders, will you for that have a regiment? Evidently no! A regiment needs officers, company formations, discipline, cohesion. And for a majority which is to govern there is needed common ideas and a fixed programme.1

But these last things are only possible through officers, cohesion, and discipline, just as in a regiment.

The experience of the representative system in France in this last quarter of a century has evolved two related phenomena, which, from some points of view, may be considered as alarming for our public liberty. One is the development of an exaggerated legislative activity; the other is the transformation which has taken place, and is increasing daily, in the form and in the nature of our legislative acts.

Our representatives give us too many new laws, and more and more the laws which they give us, instead of being declarations of principles, are the regulations of details.

The progress of democratic ideas in bringing the elector nearer to the deputy has created in both a disquieting conception of the function of law. The elector sees in it a means of satisfying all the wants which are felt by himself or those about him. It seems to him that no interests exist for which the law is not bound to provide, no situation which the law cannot regulate. If we add that the law appears to the great number of deputies as an instrument placed at their disposition for assuring the triumph of the smallest claims of their electors, we shall not be surprised to see laws piled upon laws, and shall not hesitate to recognize in this a dangerous tendency, if we admit that so far from reproaching our legislators with their excessive fecundity it is rather of sterility that the electoral body accuses them.2

And the writer goes on to say that besides expecting the executive to carry out the law the legislature intrusts it with the power of ordering all sorts of regulative details, or, in other words, secondary legislation, a remark which is curiously illustrated by the system of executive commissions established in Massachusetts. Indeed the whole passage will bear application to that State.

Nowhere are the effects of the organization of the

1 Paul Lafitte, Revue Bleue, September 9, 1893.

2 H. Barthélemy, Revue Politique et Parlementaire, January, 1897. 3 See Chap. XXII.

French legislature above described more disastrously visible than in the finances.

The best way of serving the Republic is to have good finance, to have a well-balanced budget, to manage the national fortune so as to bear without yielding the weight of charges which cannot be evaded. That is what M. Léon Say (as finance minister) has done. He has applied practical good sense to establishing a very simple budget, sparing the country new sacrifices, and has at the same time avoided touching prematurely a financial edifice constructed with so much difficulty years ago. M. Gambetta, on the other hand, who has become a passed master of finance since he is (the wholly irresponsible) president of the budget commission, has his own system. He has his financial programme with its obligatory articles, revision of the land registry, income tax, diminution or suppression of certain indirect taxes, reform of the administrative service, revision of the pension laws, complete modification of the relation of the State with the great railroad companies.1

In fact, the year 1877 was a culminating point in our budgetary history since the war, and the year 1888 is another. From 1871 to 1874 everything was to be restored, and the war indemnity was to be paid. M. Thiers with his financial genius was equal to the task. He made enormous loans and through their success discharged the debts to the enemy, liberated our territory, and introduced into the management of our finances the only method which can insure prosperity, that is to say, clearness in accounts, equilibrium rigorously maintained between actual receipts and actual expenses, and the putting in force of a real sinking fund.

In England, the sinking fund, which is the real touchstone of wellmanaged finances, has reduced the total of the public debt by about one hundred and fifty millions of francs annually.

The effects, thus far similar, have resulted from the same cause, the entire administration of the finances by a single executive head.

We, in France, on the other hand, starting from 1881 (about the date of the republican union, above described by M. Lamy) have prided ourselves on entering the road of an annual gap of six hundred millions between the total expenses and the regular receipts, and have since then, in profound peace, in the full development of our riches, increased our debt by several milliards.2

1 Revue des Deux Mondes, May, 1876—“Chronique de la Quinzaine.” 2 Le Budget de la France. A. Moireau, Revue Bleue, April 14, 1894.