in a House of over six hundred members every one had been at liberty to propose and insist upon a scheme of his own without any mediating authority to reconcile them; that different parts of these schemes had been referred to committees appointed by the Speaker and struggling in private under immense pressure of intrigue and wirepulling, while, as year after year of delay and impotence passed by, the fire of mutual exasperation was burning hotter and hotter. Could there have been any other outcome than civil war? And though the upper classes might have put down resistance by military force, it would have left Great Britain in the condition in which Italy, France, and Germany passed the next thirty years, with a bitterness of class hatred nursing the seed of future revolutions.1

Suppose, on the other hand, that in the United States, from the beginning of the century, a cabinet representing the whole country had regularly held a place in Congress and had been looked up to habitually by the country as the guide and arbiter in disputed questions; that when the first excitement showed itself in the North, the conservative classes had joined together to deprecate violence, to urge leaving the disposition of the subject to the national government, and to assure the South of their anxiety to arrive at a fair and just settlement. The agitation would then have taken the form of electing a President who, with his Cabinet, would consider what was to be done, a question not of quarrelling but of votes.

An executive thus constituted would have been assailed by both sides with eager appeals for a favorable decision. With the full discussion and evidence before the country and a deep sense of the gravity of the situation, that executive would have prepared a measure which we may assume for the purpose of illustration: "As it is evident that the

1 Compare Chap. VI. as to the actual course of events.

North with its increasing wealth and population will not long tolerate a union with slavery, and as the South cannot be expected to sacrifice an institution which is the basis of its material prosperity without full compensation, it is proposed to pay the sum of one (or two) hundred dollars for every man, woman, and child now held in slavery, the adjustment of valuation of age and sex to be made by each State government; its proportion of money to be handed over to each State government in instalments after five years from January 1 next, provided such State government shall by that time have declared the emancipation of the slaves and the extinction of slavery within its borders; and for that purpose there will be issued four (or eight) hundred millions of government bonds in such instalments as may be requisite."

Of course the scheme would have been met on both sides with fierce and contemptuous refusal. But for both sides to denounce a proposition is a different thing from denouncing each other. After the first explosion, arguments would begin to be weighed. The executive, while adhering to the main point, would postpone a decision. Speakers would be sent out, whom the South would not shoot for asking them to sell their property at a high price, nor the North hoot to silence for asking the people to put their hands in their pockets to get rid of an evil for which the whole nation was responsible. Impracticable as the plan may appear to those who remember or know the history as it was, it would certainly not have been more difficult of accomplishment than was the measure of parliamentary reform successfully carried through in Great Britain

If in the end some such scheme had succeeded, not only would it have offered infinite advantage over the arbitrament of civil war, but it would have made certain that no domestic discussion could ever after arise in this

country which would not be settled by peaceful means; while if all such attempts had failed, the North, instead of having all the nations of Europe against it when the struggle finally came, would have commanded the sympathy of the civilized world. As it was, great as was the result achieved, there remained the fatal precedent that armed force is the natural and only available means of solution of political difficulties, a lesson which unless averted by reforms in our methods of government can hardly fail to bear evil fruit at no very distant day. Its prospective effect upon the treatment of foreign affairs is hardly less manifest,

Gov

CHAPTER XX

PUBLIC FINANCE

LOVERNMENT, like most human affairs, resolves itself in the end into questions of finance. Probably few persons reflect how closely the life of the individual is bound up with money; that from the time an infant is born into the world till the man is left in his grave there is not an action or an event, and hardly even a thought, in his existence which does not involve the intervention of money. In the subdivision into small sums and the aggregation into large it is almost as plastic as the atmosphere and as essential to the continuance of human life. It may seem like modern materialism to say that there is upon the whole no element so essential to happiness, but the edge of the remark is taken off if we add that this does not depend upon the quantity but the management of money. The day laborer who through life succeeds in maintaining a surplus, however small, of income over expenditure, and can see his way to support, even on the smallest scale, in his old age, is a more independent and a happier man than the millionnaire who finds his income inadequate to the indulgences which he regards as necessaries.

The national housekeeping is but the aggregate of the individual. If it is well and carefully conducted it furnishes the strongest of examples to the whole nation. Taxes are paid cheerfully if they are felt to be economically and judiciously expended, and if they are seen to be equitably and considerately imposed. Disordered finances, on the other hand, are both a symptom and a cause of

moral disorder in a people. The civil war, which broke out in England under Charles I., turned upon shipmoney, or the right of the Crown to lay taxes without the consent of Parliament, which was the concrete expression of a great variety of grievances. The immediate cause of the first French Revolution was public bankruptcy, even while the resources of the nation were amply sufficient to meet all obligations, and this again was only the summing up of infinite abuses of all kinds which had grown up in the lapse of centuries. The revolt of the American colonies from Great Britain was based ostensibly almost entirely upon questions of taxation, and though our Civil War arose upon slavery as a cause, finance very quickly asserted itself as the main element in its conclusion.

It has already been argued1 that the British national finance is the first in the world, not because Parliament is composed of any better material than our Congress, still less because the population of Great Britain is any better than that of the United States, but because the whole initiative and control of financial legislation is in the hands of the chancellor of the exchequer, subject only to a veto by Parliament. We have now to examine the effect upon public finance of conditions exactly reversed, when the initiative of financial legislation is in the hands of two bodies of men respectively of 356 and 90 equal members, any one of whom can introduce any proposition he pleases; while the duty of evolving some order out of this chaos is intrusted to one committee of the House on Ways and Means, and a number on Appropriations, and one in the Senate on Finance, all made up of local representatives not at all responsible for administration, all working in secret with perfect security against any effective public debate, and among whom there is but one common motive force, the success or the defeat of a party; to which must

1 Chap. VI.