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a deliberative body. That is very nearly twice the size of our House of Representatives when Reed proclaimed it no longer deliberative, and half again even its present size. The French Chamber of Deputies has 610 members and the Italian 535. The pre-war German Reichstag had 397 and the present one has 459 members.

All these lower houses are deliberative bodies. Debate in all of them takes place on the floor, rather than in committees, and the fate of governments as well as of measures is determined by that debate. The debates are interesting; the newspapers publish them; the people read them, and reputations are made and lost by them.

EFFICIENT, BUT NOT RESPONSIBLE

COURSE, so cumbersome and

Firresponsible an organization as we

have described could not have operated at all unless ways had been devised for some one to run it. That "some one" was originally the Speaker, balanced at one time by the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. As was described in a previous article, the Speaker became an efficient boss, but was never held to responsibility as a leader. The committee chairmen were responsible, not to the House, but to him. He saw to it that the committees reported out the right bills, and that they were passed, and that objectionable bills were buried where they could give no trouble. It was an efficient system while it lasted, and under a good Speaker it got good legislation. But it was in no sense a responsible or representative system. It could have been developed into real leadership, but it was finally overthrown, instead, in revolt against dictatorship. Since then, a steering committee has settled questions of priority and seen to it that necessary legislation had the right of way, but the initiation and related formulation of major policies was nobody's business in Congress. Since it had to be somebody's business, somewhere, it passed to the President.

The real obstacle to making the House of Representatives a deliberative body

is not the number of members, but the number of bills. The House of Commons may have half again as many members, but it has only one one-hundredth as many bills, and it shelves most of these. Moreover, these bills are introduced already drafted by a skilled drafting bureau and need no examination except on matters of policy. Bills are short and simple; the House is not afraid to delegate the regulation of details to executive departments whose heads are constantly in its presence and accountable to it.

Not all of this could be cured in Congress, but some of it could, if there were somebody there to represent the United States. It is only because each member represents his own district and nobody represents the nation that it becomes the chief duty of all the members to prevent each of them from doing what he most wishes. Collectively, Congress may be most interested in the great national measures. Separately, each member is most interested in some minor measure, of importance to his district or group. Left to itself, Congress will represent not the whole nation, but merely the sum of all its parts. That means log-rolling; each standing by each. The only reason results have not been worse is that, while Congress has lacked constructive leadership, it has had some measures of repressive control. These have partly squelched the individual member-exactly what he and his district did not want, but what the country had to have.

CABINET OFFICERS BEFORE COMMITTEES

HIS, briefly, has been the situation

TH

Tinside ceny, has How about its re

Congress.

lation to the executive, outside?

To say that there is no contact between the legislative and executive departments would not completely state the facts. There is contact, but it is not open or responsible contact. responsible contact. Cabinet officers and their expert assistants frequently appear before Congressional committees as witnesses. Their information is at the service of the committee, and is invaluable in enabling the committee to reach its conclusions. Frequently the Cabinet of

ficer, by this process, gets what he wants and is satisfied. But Congress and the nation do not get from him what he could give the open presentation, face to face, of the executive facts and views.

Similarly, though Congress has no public "interpellation" of the Cabinet, its committees have plenty of "investigations." But this is an inquisitory process. The department investigated has practically to be put under indictment before anything is started. That day-by-day, intimate touch, by question and answer, which "interpellation" gives, even in governments so little responsible as the Legislative Councils of India, we have not at all. The only interpellation in America is the weekly quiz of the President by the newspaper correspondents. And they are not permitted to quote directly the answers they get, though they may and do use the information. Why not have the proceedings public, in Congress, by the elected representatives of the people?

Under the "literary theory" of the Constitution, there need have been very little of this conduct. It was the business of Congress to make laws and of the administrative officers to carry them out. Congress might question them, to get information, or investigate them, to see if they had executed the laws, but these could both be done in writing, or in secret committees.

But this literary theory was never completely realized in practice, and it has long been scarcely even a fiction. There is probably not a competent theorist in the world who now believes in it, even as a theory. Both in state and national governments, we have come to look to the executive for legislative leadership. We elect Presidents and Governors, not for what they say they will do, but on what they advocate Congress or the legislature doing. We reëlect or defeat them, not on what they have done or failed to do, but on what they have tried, succeeded, or failed to make the legislators do.

Right or wrong, this is our actual attitude. All we have lacked is to give

them the machinery to exercise this leadership legitimately, responsibly, and coöperatively with the legislative branch. Instead, we have expected them illegitimately to dictate to that branch, and have applauded them when they succeeded in doing so. ceeded in doing so. That is not good for them, for Congress, or for us. If we keep on with it, in due time a revolt will come against executive dictatorship quite as sharp as that which dethroned the Speaker.

Nevertheless, the responsibility of initiating major legislation is a legitimate function of the executive. We do not need theory either to sustain or to refute this. A sufficient demonstration is the fact that it is the recognized function of the executive in all other free governments, and has become its actual function here, even against our theoretical tradition.

"SEEING" LEGISLATORS

HE executive becomes a usurper of

Te

proposes, urges, and discusses laws, but when it determines the decision on them. Decision is the legislative function. This has been the evil, and the only evil, of executive leadership in America. It began when Alexander Hamilton was driven to pass his finance bill, not by argument and leadership, but by trading votes on the Capital site. It is found in every state capitol, where the Governor passes his bills, not by advocating them, face to face with the legislature, but by "seeing" members in his office and making it to their interest to vote with the administration. It operates in Washington, when Senators and Representatives find their recommendations for appointments more readily followed and their personal bills more surely passed and signed if they vote with the administration than if they show signs of insurgency.

Presidents did

It is no new scheme. not invent it. President Lowell says:

It is said that during the reign of Louis Philippe, the government kept a regular account with each Deputy, showing his votes in the Chamber on one side, and the favors

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he had been granted on the other, so that he could expect no indulgence if the balance were against him.

But France has made some advance upon the methods of Louis Philippe's time, and we should do likewise. Nevertheless, the best of Presidents have done these things. Roosevelt was one of the most ruthless, Taft the frankest, and Wilson among the most determined in using this weapon.

When we consider that these appointments are numbered by the hundreds of thousands, and that they are the currency, the circulating medium, with which Congressional politics and political machines are run, the power and huge scale of this operation become evident.

Executive leadership is one of the most useful things we could have. The President alone represents the whole nation, as distinguished from its geographic parts and social groups. He and his Cabinet are better equipped than any one else can possibly be to originate, group, and present the large national policies and to crystallize public sentiment on them. They ought to have better and more direct opportunity than they now have to bring these things to the attention of Congress and by open and responsible discussion to focus the nation's attention.

This is not a dream. It can be done. It requires no step that has not already been tested by experience, in government and in business, and is not approved in principle by the most respected authorities in practical government, in business, and in scholarship.

CHOOSE A LEADER!

Deship. It seeks it where it can find

EMOCRACY is hungry for leader

it. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln were leaders, incidentally through the Presidency but primarily because they were persons who would lead anywhere. By like token, Webster, Clay,

and Calhoun led, wherever they were. But for nearly a generation, leadership has been attaching itself to the Presidency as an institution, almost regardless of the varying temperaments of the incumbents. Roosevelt first, and a whole group of Governors contemporary with him, changed the center of gravity of government. Taft, as a legalist, had a certain predilection for the "literary theory," but to the extent that he followed it he brought on the popular judgment that his Presidency was the one failure of a long lifetime of successes.

Then came Wilson, a dictator by nature and lifelong habit. Leadership made him great, but imperiousness lost him his final battle, and the next campaign coincided exactly with the peak of the reaction. Resentful Senators, for once in control of the convention, picked for the Republican nominee the most mild-mannered Senator that ever took their program. Executive dictatorship was at last to be ended! But the placid Harding of the Senate showed at times an aroused zeal of leadership in the Presidency and earned the love of the people to the extent that he reversed the quality for which he had been selected. He died, a martyr to a crusade, and was succeeded by the mutest silence that ever was unheard in the VicePresidency. But straightway from that stillness came the voice of fighting, though not always successful, leadership of President Coolidge. of President Coolidge. The Presidency seems to have the power of transmutation.

If the Presidency does that for men, we need a way to make better use of them. As already indicated in a previous article, the thesis of this whole argument is that the way to use their leadership, and to escape the risk of their dictatorship, as well as to rehabilitate Congress itself, is to bridge the present artificial gap by bringing the President's Cabinet and the legislators face to face on the floor of Congress.

T

and no one denies that there are some unscrupulous coaches who would employ almost any method of recruiting or training men, or even of playing, to win the game.

How few really is the number of men

HAT question: "How Clean Is Sport?" comes up every two or three years in this country on the heels of every scandal in professional or intercollegiate games, and just about the time some one is ready to answer "Very clean," another scandal comes up. Usually these scandals are disposed of quickly, the guilty are punished, and the public moves along contentedly thinking that sport has been cleansed. Then another "blow-up" comes, and the same process must be gone through again with another generation of players.

Two recent events prompt these re

marks: the disclosure of an alleged attempt by some members of the New York Giants of the National League to bribe members of another team to "throw a game," and the other the report on intercollegiate athletics by the Carnegie Foundation and the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States. Everybody knows the story of the bribery charges, and everybody has some opinion about this first big scandal in baseball in five years; there is no need to talk about that and no need to argue the point that merit does count. even in professional baseball contests. Attempted crookedness may win occasionally, but unquestionably merit usually decides the issue.

The charges of dishonesty in intercollegiate sport are less tangible; they are more on the ethical side of the game,

even accused of tricky practices in baseball compared to the number of men who play clean ball throughout careers lasting many years! Should we abolish professional baseball just because a few men every few years. attempt to win by displaying lack of sportsmanship rather than real merit on the diamond? If we did we should lose the inspiring influence exerted on American youth by men like Walter Johnson, "Bucky" Harris, Christy Mathewson, Roger Peckinpaugh, "Babe" Ruth, and many others who played the game fairly and squarely. The other kind of player merely gives an object lesson in what happens to the man who permits even the shadow of suspicion to cross his record of sportsmanship.

In football, more than in any other intercollegiate sport, these charges of dishonest practice are made, and it is probably true that there is more dishonest practice in college football than in any other branch of intercollegiate sport. These abuses undoubtedly are prevalent in the smaller colleges of the country than they are in the large universities, where there is ample material for football teams.

There is no doubt that the authorities

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of some colleges and even state universities permit the playing of "ringers" on the college football team, and that these professional players are encouraged by easy courses of study and even more material concessions to continue a somewhat intermittent attendance in a few "snap courses."

to offer in training, culture, learning, and character-building.

I have always contended that the development of the body is as important as the development of the mind, and in actual life outside of college the man who wins is the man who develops and maintains by sensible methods the physique necessary for success in any career.

Excessive

In fact, I am told of one universitynot, however, of any dominating importance in the football world-which permitted the playing of "ringers" despite a long row kept up by some of the faculty members who insisted that a losing team comprising men legitimately enrolled in their classes, and of good academic standing, was far more desirable from the standpoint of sportsmanship, morale, and the cultivation of good character among the students, than an invincible team of "professional students," whose academic lives had to be sustained by periodic whiffs of oxygen administered by the Committee on Scholarship. The row over" ringers" became so acute in that institution that at least one of the best department heads had to retire to another university, where a man's academic record was never measured by how he could catch a forward pass.

Possibly the attendance record at the institution was increased by the somewhat sullied victories of this reproachable team, but educational institutions in the main are not competing for students on the basis of a series of dishonest football victories rather than upon what they have

Good health is just

as much one of the fundamentals of success, in the mind of the wise parent and educator, as good mental training and good char

acter.

PURPOSE OF THE SPECTACULAR COLLEGE CONTEST HOSE who carp most about intercollegiate athletics forget entirely that the big football game, the big track meet, the big tennis matches, the big oratorical contest, and the big debates, lead many hundreds of students into those activities, and in that way confer a great benefit. They are not merely spectacular contests

lasting a few hours; they supply inspiration to hundreds during weeks and months of training and preparation. The training period of the athletic team. impresses with the necessity of clean and careful living not only the scores on the squad, but hundreds of others who hope to make the squad. How much better it would be if every man would carry this lesson with him through life!

In no other nation in the world is the lesson of clean living being so well learned by the younger generation as in the United States, and a great deal of the credit,