Do Our Representatives Represent?

OCTOBER, 1914

BY FRANCIS E. LEUPP

I

IN a recent number of the Atlantic Monthly an English writer sketches the political and social changes which have come over the British Isles within the last generation.¹ His survey is made with particular reference to the mooted point, how far representative government has been promoted or impaired by these changes; and at the conclusion of his article he goes to the bottom of the whole business by asking what, after all, is ‘real representation.’ In the United States, within the corresponding period, we have been experiencing changes as momentous as those in the mother country, and the same fundamental question confronts us as we glance over the fields in which they have occurred.

Representation, considered without special reference to domestic politics, may take any one of several forms. The envoy, for example, represents his sovereign in a manner quite unlike that in which the guardian represents his ward. The envoy must make himself as nearly as practicable the mirror and echo of his sovereign, whose idiosyncrasies and passing whims he must reflect with equal faithfulness, whether they appeal to his common sense or revolt it. The guardian, on the other hand, however well settled the terms of his appointment, and regardless of the share the ward may have been allowed in his selection, is clothed with a discretion for the exercise of which he is held to as strict account as for his honesty. Of alternative courses open to him in any instance, the one promising immediate profit and eagerly desired by the ward, the other presenting fewer superficial attractions but pointing to larger advantages in the future, he is bound to take that which, according to his own best judgment, will be for the ward’s greater eventual benefit. Then, there is the representative relation of the attorney, who, though accepting the client’s instructions with his retainer, is nevertheless subject to the higher obligations of professional ethics, and must be ever mindful that he is an officer of the court as well as a private practitioner. Finally, there is the familiar illustration of the stockholder in a corporate enterprise, who assigns to a proxy the right to vote in his stead on matters of vital importance, not only leaving to this representative absolute freedom of action, but approving and validating in advance every step he may take.

So it will be seen that representation is a term not so easy to define as one might suppose, and especially difficult when we use it to describe the duty of a public servant. Does it mean that the man we put into office shall always do there just what we should have done if we had been handling the same affairs directly? Or does it mean that, in a crisis where his judgment and ours differ with respect to a large question which he has had a better opportunity than we to study at close range, he is to obey our orders in defiance of his personal conviction that to do so would make for our ultimate injury? Or does it mean t hat if the code of official ethics adopted and maintained for the common good stands in the way of his accomplishing some purpose on which we individually have set our hearts, he shall disregard it in the assertion of his representative character? Or does it mean that, when we put him where he is, we turned over to him every power, right, and privilege we possessed in the premises, and deliberately estopped ourselves from further interference in the business we intrusted to him?

II

At one time or another, and wholly or in part, representative government in the United States has passed through all these phases. In great emergencies, like that presented by the Civil War and its immediate sequelæ, the people with practical unanimity surrendered to the government at Washington all authority, to be exercised as might seem best on any occasion. It was the sense that they had done this, and were bound to stand by their bargain, that kept the country generally quiet in the face of repeated trespasses by the military power upon the civil domain, and permitted the piling up of the public debt, the resort to an irredeemable paper currency, the imposition of extraordinary taxes, the recruiting of the army by conscription, the unceremonious seizure and destruction of private property, the arbitrary creation and division of states, the wholesale emancipation of the slaves by executive proclamation, and many other measures which, under different conditions, would have been condemned as despotic. We have seen a senator sent to Coventry for voting his convictions at an impeachment trial, although he was doing only what he had solemnly sworn to do. We have seen a reëlection refused to one President because he told the truth, as he saw it, about the tariff, in pursuance of his constitutional duty to recommend to the consideration of Congress ‘such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient,’and to another because he kept too strictly within the limits set by the organic law upon his jurisdiction.

The fathers of the Constitution had their own notion of what representation meant. With them, it was obviously the relation of guardian to ward; and their debates in the convention of 1787 showed that, in their opinion, the safety of the republic depended on avoiding an undue intimacy between the twain, by taking care that the ward should not have too much to say about the choice of the guardian. The proletariat were to have their welfare safeguarded, of course, but it was not for them to meddle with the machinery established for this purpose, since presumptively they would not know what was best for them. The right to vote ought to be restricted to the class who would use it wisely, and probably a property qualification would furnish the most effective gauge for separating that class from the others. When this proposition was before the Convention, Mr. Dickinson of Maryland spoke in favor of it. ‘The freeholders of the country,’ he declared, ’are the best guardians of liberty, and the restriction of the right to them is a necessary defense against the dangerous influence of the multitudes without property and without principle, with which our country, like all others, will in time abound.'

‘The time,’ said Gouverneur Morris of New York, ‘is not distant, when this country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers, who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure and faithful guardians of liberty—the impregnable barriers against aristocracy? The ignorant and the dependent can be as little trusted with the public interest as children!’

‘Viewing the subject in its merits alone,’ said Madison of Virginia, ‘the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty. In future times, a great majority of the people will not only be without property in land, but property of any sort. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation, or, what is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case, there will be equal danger on another side.’

And thus it went. Even Franklin, with all his unaristocratic antecedents, and his repugnance to the idea of conferring the ballot upon property while denying it to human beings, based his most powerful plea on what seemed a purely sentimental theory, that the possession of the elective franchise would of itself inspire nobility of character in the citizen. Considerations of prudence finally prevailed to turn the whole issue over to the states, letting them individually decide to whom, within their own borders, they would grant the ballot and to whom refuse it. In those days, so strong was the sense of the value of property as a means of grace for the administration of a public trust, that it was soberly proposed to require a certain degree of wealth of every one who aspired to an important office — that the President, for instance, should be possessed of not less than one hundred thousand dollars, a judge of fifty thousand, and a member of Congress of a fortune of proportionate size.

How slender was the faith of the delegates generally in the discretion and integrity of the masses of the people, is plain from the distinction made between the methods prescribed for choosing the members of the two houses of Congress, and between the lengths of their respective terms; from the confining of the consideration of foreign treaties to the indirectly chosen Senate; from the indirect process laid down for the election of President; from the powder vested in the President thus elected to appoint the judiciary, and officers who represent the United States in dealing with other nations; and from the inclusion of the executive with Congress as a part of the law-making machinery. The direct share of the people in all this was narrowed down practically to the election of their representatives in Congress, who were to have the initiation of measures affecting taxation, and an equal share with the Senate in all legislation. In order that the great body of citizens should have a fairly frequent hearing for their views on public questions, the membership of the House of Representatives was to be completely renewed once in two years. This, it was believed, would provide for the prompt reflection of all changes of opinion among a constituency recognized as liable to fickleness; but, lest such changes should be too frequent for the country’s good, there stood the Senate, free from immediate responsibility to the populace, and intrenched behind a fixed term of six years, ready to act as a steadying force.

The Senate’s function of compelling deliberation has been illustrated in many ways, but in none better than by one of the apocryphal stories of George Washington on which an earlier generation was brought up. He was said to have been asked at a friend’s table, why we had aped the feudal institutions of Great Britain to the extent of having a select as well as a popular house in our Congress. His hostess had just helped him to a cup of tea, so hot that it was sending forth a cloud of steam. He poured a part of the tea into his saucer, and let it stand long enough to cool before drinking. ‘This cup,’ said he, ‘is the House of Representatives. Its contents have come directly from the people, who may be in a state of great excitement. This saucer is the Senate, in which I can hold the scalding liquid till its heat has subsided enough to make it safe to drink.’

Carrying the same idea a stage further, the Constitution empowered the President to halt the enactment of a proposed law till he could set forth any reasons he might have for regarding it as ill-advised or inopportune, and thus procure its review in a calmer spirit. The restriction of all foreign negotiations to the President and Senate, also, was designed to put wholly outside of a volatile atmosphere the consideration of matters which might bring our government into collision with others. And with respect to the judiciary, the influence of popular passion and impulse was to be nullified by lifting the Federal bench out of the arena of politics, where the decision of a magistrate in some critical case might be more or less swayed by his dread of incurring the disfavor of his constituents.

III

All this was a century and a quarter ago. In the interval the population of the United States has risen from four million to nearly one hundred million souls, with a proportional multiplication of social and economic problems, particularly in the present generation, when the increase in the population has been more than equaled by the increase of its density around certain centres of industrial activity. What the fathers foresaw has come to pass: an enormous multitude of our people is without property, or with very little. Yet manhood suffrage prevails in almost all the states, and, in the few where any restrictions whatever are imposed, those restrictions are mostly educational tests of an elementary order. The property qualification which loomed so large in the minds of Dickinson and Morris and Madison, and which was widely adopted in the early days, is now everywhere obsolete or obsolescent, Large wealth has accumulated in the hands of a small minority of our people. Human nature meanwhile has remained human nature, and the class cleavage has followed financial lines rather than lines of ancestry or of worldly knowledge, with the result that the citizen with insignificant means or no means at all is set in antagonism to the citizen with plenty.

Class-consciousness manifests itself in politics, because politics furnishes the machinery for representation, and representation for legislation; and the whole trend of modern legislation has been in the direction of satisfying the demands of the masses for direct relief or enlarged opportunity. The primitive assumption that government is merely a form of organization to be supported by the people for their common convenience, with functions limited to the maintenance of order, the adjustment of controverted rights, and the protection of the persons and property subject to its jurisdiction, has been gradually working over into an assumption that it is the business of this government, at least, to support the people.

For indications marking stages in such a process, read in the national statute-book the laws requiring a rigid inspection of meat products; penalizing the adulteration of foods and drugs; establishing a postal savings system to encourage thrift among the poor; compelling the use of special appliances on railroads to make the handling of trains less dangerous for employees; prescribing the length of a day’s work in sundry occupations; creating bureaus to investigate, and incidentally to expose to public criticism, the methods pursued in privately owned industries and in the employment of particular classes of laborers; condemning to destruction a once profitable line of manufacture because its raw materials were unwholesome for its artisans to work with; making employers liable for injuries suffered by their workmen while on duty; excluding from our shores sundry classes of immigrants lest they underbid our citizens in the labor markets; constructing mammoth reclamation projects for the benefit of the farmers of the arid West; making war upon lotteries and the prostitute traffic; and for a score of cognate purposes entirely beyond the contemplation of the framers of the Constitution. These, indeed, appear to be but the initiatory features of a new epoch, if we believe that President Wilson will carry his anti-trust, agricultural-education, and farmer-loan programmes to success, and if we are prepared to treat seriously the efforts of certain members of Congress to commit that body to a policy regarding marriage and divorce, to t he regulation of stock and produce exchanges, and to the exemption of labor organizations from the operation of the laws against monopoly.

These things are in addition to a heap of legislation enacted in the several states, some of which is consistent, while much is more or less in conflict, with the United States laws on the same subjects. In order to reconcile the discordant elements as far as may be, the boundaries which used to separate state from Federal jurisdiction are in process of being obliterated. Here is, of course, a radical departure from the plans of the Constitution-makers, who never lost sight of the origin of the republic as a mere union of independent sovereignties for the better assurance of their joint defense against domestic insurrection and hostilities from without. The national ideal is now invading every field of legislation, supplanting both the ideal of state sovereignty and the federal theory, and running parallel with the struggle for self-assertion among the masses of the people and their more and more clamorous insistence that, the will of the numerical majority shall override all considerations of differences in intelligence, education, or social condition.

Whoever has watched the movement with a discerning eye must read in it, I think, the gradual transformation of a representative government, under a thin veil of democracy, which we inherited, into a democracy with a few superficial insignia of representative government, cherished rather for memory’s sake than for any faith in their virtues.

The Constitution is distinguished no less for its elasticity than for its strength. When circumstances have called into existence a public policy for which no explicit sanction could be found in its text, resort has been had to some clause which would stretch if pulled hard enough. Thus, when all state-bank currency had to be driven out of existence, a prohibitory tax was levied under the right of Congress to lay and collect taxes; when the great carrying corporations seemed to need government oversight, the power of Congress to regulate commerce between the states was invoked; and when any novel demand could not be met otherwise, the ‘general welfare’ clause of the preamble and the first section of article one proved of timely convenience. Neither the eleven paragraphs added before the close of the eighteenth century to supply a few omissions discovered in the original text, nor the Twelfth Amendment, adopted in 1804 to make the electoral system more workable, affected the spirit of the Constitution as first promulgated; so it may be said with truth that the republic conducted its business for seventy-five years under a charter essentially unaltered. The farreaching results of the Civil War made necessary the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, but these were followed by more than forty years of quiescence.

IV

The purpose of this brief historical review is to emphasize the reluctance of the American people in the past to tamper with their Constitution, and hence the revolutionary significance of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth amendments, proclaimed in 1913. Both have in view the expedition of the democratizing process which has already been noted. The Sixteenth Amendment recognizes the increasing power of individual wealth throughout the country, and is designed to compel the assumption by the moneyed class of a larger share of the common burden. To this end it sweeps away state barriers, and authorizes the national government to impose a tax on incomes without regard to the distribution of population or representation. It clears the way for the capture of the possessor of great riches wherever found, and for calling him to the same account as his neighbor who has little or nothing — or, as it has worked out in the exemption provisions of the present act, to an account far more severe.

The Seventeenth Amendment, by which the choice of senators is transferred from the legislatures of the several states to the people thereof, was doubtless the outgrowth of a widespread distrust of legislatures. It recalls the answer of a notorious speculator who flourished in my youth, and whose ventures depended often on the success of his lobby work, to the question why he took so languid an interest in the preliminaries to an election impending in his state. ‘It is cheaper to buy the legislature after election than the voters before it.’ Whether the remark was earnestly made, or in cynical humor, it spread like wildfire, it was so at one with what was known of the character of its author, and comported so well with the sense of suspicion that lurked in the popular mind regarding the uprightness of law-makers of the rank commonly sent to the state capitals.

About this time, also, began a series of deadlocks in the legislatures which had senators to elect, and one or two of them occurred at critical junctures when it was important to a state to have a full representation at Washington. Finally, the indirect method of election, which kept the Senate always at arm’s length from the people, and gave it the name of an American House of Lords, became more and more an object of notice and attack in the press. Some of the most censorious critics insisted that the Senate had outgrown whatever of usefulness it might once have possessed, and would better be discarded altogether; this brought a more conservative group of citizens to its defense, and a compromise between the two extremes of view was reached on the basis of letting the people of a state express in some way their preference between senatorial candidates, as a guide to the legislature. And, while several plans of this sort were under discussion, came Tillman.

Long after the Civil War had ended Negro slavery, most of the South clung to its aristocratic traditions of public service with intense tenacity. Its leaders were not ’men of the people’ either by descent or in sympathies. Their ancestors had been conspicuous figures in their respective States for several generations; they were scions of Revolutionary stock or of the navy of 1812, or sprung from families which had given governors, legislators, or judges to the community in trying times of old. All were well versed in American history, many had won local fame as orators, and there were few who had not both the ancient and the English classics at their tongues’ command. The loss of their slaves and the deterioration of their plantations had left them financially stranded, and some salaried office seemed to the worshipful yeomanry around them to offer the best means of providing for their needs. So a stream of blue blood poured from the South into Congress, and especially into the Senate, from the hour that the Reconstruction bogey was exorcised from Southern politics.

The first break came when Benjamin R. Tillman, the head of an insurgent movement among the inelegant rustics of South Carolina, succeeded in getting himself elected Governor, and forcing the legislature to drop Wade Hampton and send John L. M. Irby to the Senate. A little later he came himself. A ‘ farmer ’ — not a ‘ planter ’ — by occupation, redolent of the upturned soil in appearance, manners, and speech, and accused by local gossips of having sat in a wagon in an open marketplace and sold the produce of his acres, it would be hard to imagine a sharper human contrast than was presented by this man and his immediate predecessor, Matthew C. Butler, every line in whose face bore witness to his pedigree, and whose voice and bearing were those of a well-bred citizen of the world. I remember the despairing comment of a South Carolinian of distinguished lineage who was in Washington when the news arrived that Tillman had defeated Butler: ‘This means that the end is at hand!’ He read the omen aright. The oligarchy which had ruled the South for more than a century by virtue of the strain of rulership in its blood, was facing everywhere a disaster from which there could be no recovery. The common people were learning their strength, and had begun to make use of it.

If doubt remained in any mind of the meaning of Tillman’s election, it was dispelled with his first irruption as a debater in the Senate, when he said,

‘I am the only farmer in this august body. Yet out of seventy million people in this country, thirty-five million are engaged in agriculture. If, then, one farmer has broken down the barriers and forced his way here, upon his head rests the responsibility of giving utterance to the feelings, the aspirations of his fellows. Before I get through, you will realize that I speak plainly and bluntly . . . the language of the common people; for I am one of them, and I expect to tell you how they feel, and what they think, and what they want!’ And proceeding to discuss certain questions which he said had been threshed out by lawyers, and corporation magnates, and nearly everybody else, but had ‘not yet been handled on the pitchfork of the farmer,’ he laid about him savagely, particularly denouncing the Cleveland administration for having betrayed the Democratic party and surrendered the nation into the control of a plutarchy.

The ‘pitchfork speech’ was the sensation of the day; but whoever supposed that it was to remain a unique oratorical curio was destined to be speedily undeceived. Every slogan of revolt raised in national politics since then, from the nasal wails of Teller at St. Louis to the leonine roars of Johnson at Chicago, has had for its burden the same grievance that Tillman voiced: The clique in power represents not the masses but the classes! The men who hold the captains’ commissions under its banner are not of the people, or in close accord with the people; whereas the candidates put forward by the remonstrants have this supreme excellence, that, they come from the people, believe in the people, think with the people, and are prepared to obey the wishes of the people at every turn and to the last extreme. Economic and financial issues such as engaged the best thought and finest eloquence of the wise men who sat in the Capitol a generation ago, and through them captured the attention of their constituents, hold a secondary place in the popular interest now, the first place having been usurped by social and humane problems which formerly were regarded as outside the pale of governmental activity; and Congress has been steadily growing, as we have seen, more and more responsive to this latter-day bent of the public mind.

V

Thus, between the foundation of the republic and the present hour, the general conception of what Congress ought to be and do has passed from one pole to the other: from the theory that a member was to be chosen because of his superior antecedents and culture, his greater independence of spirit, his wider experience, and his larger stake at hazard than the bulk of his constituency, to a demand for a man who is no better than his neighbors,’ and who consequently will not be above doing what they wish to have done, whatever his private convictions or inclinations may be.

Drop into the gallery of either chamber to-day, and you will hear your fellow visitors discussing men and measures on a more parochial basis than in the old times. Such personalities as enter into their conversation take the form of comments on Jim Smith’s efforts to get an appropriation for a new postoffice building in his home town, with all the work and wages it would bring there; on the probable falling-off in Tom Jones’s farmer vote now that his supply of free seeds is cut down; on Bill Robinson’s genius as a hustler, demonstrated by his getting the Indian reservation in his district irrigated and then opened for homestead settlement. Spend a whole day in the gallery, and you will hardly hear a visitor boast of being a constituent of Henry Tompkins because he has earned the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, or framed the winning act for a revision of the navigation laws. In other words, despite the wider spread of the national spirit, what a Congressman does for the nation counts for less now with most of the people in his district than what he does for his immediate neighbors, albeit the one service is largely a matter of cleverness while the other calls for statesmanship. This is human nature, doubtless; perhaps, also, it accords with the well-cherished ideal of representation, that the unit should be as small as practicable.

As might have been foreseen, one effect of bringing Congress nearer to the people has been the elimination from the national legislature of many of its notable figures. A generation ago the Senate held a picturesque group of history-builders. It included Conkling, who daily reserved his appearance in the chamber till the other senators were seated and the scene set, and whose majestic march down the middle aisle reminded one of the entrance of the king in a Shakespearean drama; Blaine, who had only to rise for a perfunctory motion in order to smite the galleries with a spell of expectant silence and capture the eyes and ears of his colleagues; Hamlin, in his old-fashioned swallow-tail coat, whose association with the memory of Lincoln seemed to draw the great war wonderfully near; Edmunds and Hoar, conserving, in their range of thought and speech, the best traditions of New England statesmanship; Hampton and Bayard, exhaling the flavor of the old South; David Davis, who twice had held the fate of the country in his hand; Chandler and Ingalls and Mahone, guerilla-fighters but powers in their way; Allison and Cockrell, Sanders, Gordon, Voorhees, Hawley, Hill, and a dozen others whose names and stories were household words from one end of the United States to the other.

In the House, during the same period, sat Reed, the despot, and Kasson, the diplomatist; Carlisle, the logician, and Morrison, the bludgeon-bearer; Blackburn, the fiery, and Wheeler, the spider-like; Kelley and Randall, the protectionist twins; Wilson, the polished, and Hepburn, the blunt; Alexander H. Stephens in his wheel-chair; Knott, the witty, and Holman, the frugal; Bland and Butterworth, Bragg and Curtin, Sherman and Mills and Reagan. Cannon, whose recent retirement about exhausts this strain, was then well past his apprenticeship. In their several fields, these were efficient workers. They had force, shrewdness, individuality; their modes of self-expression had a quality challenging to the attention and compelling to the memory. Their purely human characteristics were so pronounced and so well advertised that they were recognized wherever they appeared, even schoolchildren making their acquaintance through the cartoons. When they left the centre of the stage, something went with them out of our public life which may never be replaced. Whether they were, or were not, as truly ‘representative’ of their constituents as their successors are, they were unquestionably, as a rule, of a higher type than the average of the body politic; and however history may rank them as to their total value to their country, it is but just to say that they helped keep their generation steady, and lent color and spice to the contemporary chronicles.

Of course, I have not forgotten the presence in Congress, as I write, of a Root and a La Follette, a Champ Clark and an Underwood; but it is doubtful whether the most nearly unique personality in the present group can make the same impression on the minds of his countrymen that some of the old fellows made. Moreover, admitting whatever may be said of the increasingly representative character of recent Congresses, assuming representation to be another name for reflection, the question is pertinent, whether this is a virtue to be acclaimed under all circumstances. Are there not occasions when disobedience in the servant is worth more to the master than obedience? Where is the senator, trained in the rigorous school of representation so loudly commended by an impatient populace to-day, whom we could trust to snap party ties, turn his back on sectional claims, and defy the instructions of his state, as Lucius Lamar did when he voted against the silver heresy for conscience’ sake? And where is the state that would respond now, as Mississippi did then, by reversing its own attitude in approval of the senator’s manliness? How many men sitting in either chamber of the present Congress should we look to see, if another crisis arose like that reached in the railroad strikes of 1894, stepping out of their party ranks to uphold the hands of a hostile administration in a struggle with mob violence over a labor question, like Cushman Davis of Minnesota when he came to the support of President Cleveland? In both Lamar’s case and Davis’s, popular sentiment seemed to press in one direction, while the judgment of the man elected to expound and enforce it pressed in another.

A man who stood ‘ closer to the people’and shared their desires more literally, or who, regardless of his own convictions, felt that the first duty of a representative was to represent the opinions of his principal, would not have taken the course of Davis or Lamar; and not only would a worthy cause have suffered, but the moral influence of such timely courage would have been lost to the republic.

VI

If space permitted, it would be interesting to inquire how much further the democratizing trend of the day is likely to go, in the elimination of indirection from our methods of selecting public servants. For example, we are already launching a presidential primary plan, designed to dispense with party nominating conventions, and, in theory at least, to come nearer to a popular designation of candidates. When we remember how shortly the senatorial primary plan preceded the adoption of a constitutional amendment for the popular election of senators, would it be strange to see another amendment soon started on its way, providing for the choice of the President by direct popular vote? We might also comment on the significance of the recent proposal to abolish secret sessions of the Senate. This project, certainly, is quite in keeping with the general disposition to hold the representatives of the people to a stricter account, for it means that no senator should take advantage of emptied galleries and locked doors to speak or vote as he would not have dared to do while in full view. Whether open executive sessions might not also tend to encourage demagogism, is apart from the main question.

This doubt, however, suggests a broader one: whether the popular revolt against all the old institutions is going to bring about the results directly aimed at. Are the people going to rule themselves any more under the new régime than they did under the old? Will not what is gained in one direction be equaled, or more than equaled, by what is lost in another? Most of mankind prefer following a leader to picking out a path for themselves, so long as they are permitted to cherish a few illusions of ultimate authority; and the leader who has acquired the habit of telling his fellow partisans what they had better do and then proceeding to the task himself, slips easily into a way of telling them what they must do and what they shall do. The People’s Party, as will be recalled, was founded on the theory that the people were tired of being bossed. The convention at which it was organized was, for that reason, not a delegate but a mass convention; nevertheless, even as early as that, some of its prominent members quarreled among themselves as to who should steer its deliberations. A few years later I attended one of its national gatherings, where the presiding officer, a man of giant frame, strident voice, and commanding personality, took the whole business into his own hands. Towering above the babel, he would put motions into mouths which had never so much as opened; call for votes, and declare them carried or lost as he saw fit; and adjourn a session, and set the hour for reassembling, with the utmost Indifference to what anybody else might desire.

Walking with him to his hotel after one such monodramatic morning, I remarked, ‘You seem to have your convention well in hand.’

He scanned my face keenly to discover whether I was serious or in jest, and then answered, with a broad smile, ‘Well, you see, these people are mostly farmers. They don’t know much about parliamentary forms. I understand pretty well what they want to do; and, with such a crowd to handle, the “short cut” is usually the best.’

Loud applause from many sides greeted the revolt against the rule of Speaker Cannon in the House of Representatives five or six years ago. Yet Cannon was not the only autocrat, or even the most notable, in the history of his place and era: he merely chanced to be reigning when the time arrived for an upheaval. Sometimes, indeed, the autocracy of a Speaker has been the salvation of a situation. Mr. Carlisle, famous as the fairest-minded and gentlest of the men who have filled the high chair in the House, obeyed an impulse of patriotism as opposed to the obvious preferences of a majority of his fellow members when, in the first session of the Forty-ninth Congress, he held back the committee appointments till the Christmas recess, in order that the committee on coinage might be surely under control of safe men. As a specimen of bossism, this does not seem to fall far behind the course taken by his successor, ‘Czar’ Reed, when the Senate sent over an act for the free and unlimited coinage of silver, and he refused to lay it before the House in the usual way, but privately referred it where it would be kept under cover till the sound-money members could mature their plans for dealing with it. How much of the present fine financial credit of the United States is due to the arbitrary domination of these two men during a crucial epoch, few persons realize who were not in the thick of affairs at the capital while the life-and-death struggle over the fifty-cent dollar was going on.

Even Tillman, the first Goth to scale the wall of a super-civilized Senate, has a record in the same line. He rose to eminence, as we have seen, as the champion of popular government against an oligarchy; but he made his second campaign for the governorship of South Carolina on the plea that he could not give his state a reform administration unless he could have control of its legislature. ‘Turn out these driftwood legislators,’ he shouted from every stump, ‘and send me a legislature that will do what I say, and I’ll give you reform!’

So we come back to the question: What is real representation? Is it representation of the intelligence, or of the obtuseness or folly, of the community? Is it responsible representation, or puppet-like? Is it what our fathers had in mind, or what we have got, or what our children seem destined to receive? Which is the better represented: the community which commits its interests freely to the keeping of an able, well-trained, patriotic man, who is too discerning to confuse right with wrong or individual privilege with the general good, and too self-respecting to be afraid of his constituents; or the community which insists on leasing the soul of its representative, as well as his hands and his brain, for the price of his annual salary, and dictating absolutely his conduct while in office? Or at what stage between these two extremes can it be said with most truth that our representatives represent?