The Essential Writings of President Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson
this blunder. The two most remarkable Republican institutions in the world commit it. In both the American and Swiss Constitutions the Upper House has as much authority as the second; it could produce the maximum of impediment—a dead-lock, if it liked; if it does not do so, it is owing not to the goodness of the legal constitution, but to the discreetness of the members of the Chamber. In both these constitutions this dangerous division is defended by a peculiar doctrine.... It is said that there must be in a federal government some institution, some authority, some body possessing a veto in which the separate States comprising the Confederation are all equal. I confess this doctrine has to me no self-evidence, and it is assumed, but not proved. The State of Delaware is not equal in power or influence to the State of New York, and you cannot make it so by giving it an equal veto in an Upper Chamber. The history of such an institution is indeed most natural. A little State will like, and must like, to see some token, some memorial mark, of its old independence preserved in the Constitution by which that independence is extinguished. But it is one thing for an institution to be natural, and another for it to be expedient. If indeed it be that a federal government compels the erection of an Upper Chamber of conclusive and coördinate authority, it is one more in addition to the many other inherent defects of that kind of government. It may be necessary to have the blemish, but it is a blemish just as much."
It would be in the highest degree indiscreet to differ lightly with any conclusion to which Mr. Bagehot may have come in viewing that field of critical exposition in which he was supreme, the philosophical analysis, namely, of the English Constitution; and it must be apparent to any one who reads the passage I have just now quoted that his eye sees very keenly and truly even when he looks across sea at institutions which were repugnant to his own way of thinking. But it is safe to say that he did not see all in this instance, and that he was consequently in error concerning the true nature of our federal legislative system. His error, nevertheless, appears, not when we look only at the facts which he held up to view, but when we look at other facts which he ignored. It is true that the existence of two coequal Houses is an evil when those two Houses are of distinct natures, as was the case under the Victorian Constitution to which Mr. Bagehot refers by way of illustrative example. Under that Constitution all legislative business was sometimes to be seen quite suspended because of irreconcilable differences of opinion between the Upper House, which represented the rich wool-growers of the colony, and the Lower Assembly, which represented the lesser wool-growers, perhaps, and the people who were not wool-growers at all. The Upper House, in other words, was a class chamber, and thus stood quite apart from anything like the principle embodied in our own Senate, which is no more a class chamber than is the House of Representatives.
The prerogatives of the Senate do, indeed, render our legislative system more complex, and for that reason possibly more cumbersome, than the British; for our Senate can do more than the House of Lords. It can not only question and stay the judgment of the Commons, but may always with perfect safety act upon its own judgment and gainsay the more popular chamber to the end of the longest chapter of the bitterest controversy. It is quite as free to act as is any other branch of the government, and quite as sure to have its acts regarded. But there is safety and ease in the fact that the Senate never wishes to carry its resistance to the House to that point at which resistance must stay all progress in legislation; because there is really a "latent unity" between the Senate and the House which makes continued antagonism between them next to impossible—certainly in the highest degree improbable. The Senate and the House are of different origins, but virtually of the same nature. The Senate is less democratic than the House, and consequently less sensible to transient phases of public opinion; but it is no less sensible than the House of its ultimate accountability to the people, and is consequently quite as obedient to the more permanent and imperative judgments of the public mind. It cannot be carried so quickly by every new sentiment, but it can be carried quickly enough. There is a main chance of election time for it as well as for the House to think about.
By the mode of its election and the greater length of the term by which its seats are held, the Senate is almost altogether removed from that temptation to servile obedience to the whims of popular constituencies to which the House is constantly subject, without as much courage as the Senate has to guard its virtue. But the men who compose the Senate are of the same sort as the members of the House of Representatives, and represent quite as various classes. Nowadays many of the Senators are, indeed, very rich men, and there has come to be a great deal of talk about their vast wealth and the supposed aristocratic tendencies which it is imagined to breed. But even the rich Senators cannot be said to be representatives of a class, as if they were all opulent wool-growers or great land-owners. Their wealth is in all sorts of stocks, in all sorts of machinery, in all sorts of buildings, in possessions of all the sorts possible in a land of bustling commerce and money-making industries. They have made their money in a hundred different ways, or have inherited it from fathers who amassed it in enterprises too numerous to imagine; and they have it invested here, there, and everywhere, in this, that, and everything. Their wealth represents no class interests, but all the interests of the commercial world. It represents the majority of the nation, in a word; and so they can probably be trusted not to neglect one set of interests for another; not to despoil the trader for the sake of the farmer, or the farmer for the sake of the wool-grower, or the wool-grower for the behoof of the herder of short-horned cattle. At least the Senate is quite as trustworthy in this regard as is the House of Representatives.
Inasmuch as the Senate is thus separated from class interests and quite as representative of the nation at large as is the House of Representatives, the fact that it is less quickly sensitive to the hasty or impulsive movements of public opinion constitutes its value as a check, a steadying weight, in our very democratic system. Our English cousins have worked out for themselves a wonderfully perfect scheme of government by gradually making their monarchy unmonarchical. They have made of it a republic steadied by a reverenced aristocracy and pivoted upon a stable throne. And just as the English system is a limited monarchy because of Commons and Cabinet, ours may be said to be a limited democracy because of the Senate. This has in the trial of the scheme proved the chief value of that upper chamber which was instituted principally as an earnest of the abiding equality and sovereignty of the States. At any rate, this is the most conspicuous, and will prove to be the most lasting, use of the Senate in our system. It is valuable in our democracy in proportion as it is undemocratic. I think that a philosophical analysis of any successful and beneficent system of self-government will disclose the fact that its only effectual checks consist in a mixture of elements, in a combination of seemingly contradictory political principles; that the British government is perfect in proportion as it is unmonarchical, and ours safe in proportion as it is undemocratic; that the Senate saves us often from headlong popular tyranny.
"The value, spirit, and essence of the House of Commons," said Burke, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation;" but the image of the nation's feelings should not be the only thing reflected by the constitution of a free government. It is indispensable that, besides the House of Representatives which runs on all fours with popular sentiment, we should have a body like the Senate which may refuse to run with it at all when it seems to be wrong—a body which has time and security enough to keep its head, if only now and then and but for a little while, till other people have had time to think. The Senate is fitted to do deliberately and well the revising which is its properest function, because its position as a representative of state sovereignty is one of eminent dignity, securing for it ready and sincere respect, and because popular demands, ere they reach it with definite and authoritative suggestion, are diluted by passage through the feelings and conclusions of the state legislatures, which are the Senate's only immediate constituents. The Senate commonly feels with the House, but it does not, so to say, feel so fast. It at least has a chance to be the express image of those judgments of the nation which are slower and more temperate than its feelings.
This it is which makes the Senate "the most powerful and efficient second chamber that exists,"43 and this it is which constitutes its functions one of the effectual checks, one of the real balances, of our system; though it is made to seem very insignificant in the literary theory of the Constitution, where the checks of state upon federal authorities, of executive prerogatives upon legislative powers, and of Judiciary upon President and Congress, though some