The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce

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СКАЧАТЬ cannot be obtained owing to the small number who vote.¹ This has its good side, for it is a check on hasty or frequent change. But it adds greatly to the difficulty of working a rigid or supreme constitution, that you may find an admitted, even if not very grave evil, to be practically irremovable, because the mass of the people cannot be induced to care enough about the matter to come to the polls, and there deliver their judgment upon it.

      These defects are so obvious that we are entitled to expect to find correspondingly strong grounds for the maintenance, and indeed the steady extension of the plan of legislating by and through a constitution. What are these grounds? Why does American practice tend more and more to remove legislation from the legislature and entrust it to the people?

      One could quite well imagine the several state governments working without fundamental instruments to control them. In a federal government which rests on, or at least which began from, a compact between a number of originally separate communities, the advantages of having the relations of these communities to one another and to the central authority defined by an instrument placed beyond the reach of the ordinary legislature, and not susceptible of easy change, are clear and strong. Such an instrument is the guarantee for the rights of each member placed above the impulses of a chance majority. The case is quite different when we come to a single homogeneous community. Each American state might now, if it so pleased, conduct its own business, and govern its citizens as a commonwealth “at common law,” with a sovereign legislature, whose statutes formed the highest expression of popular will. Nor need it do so upon the cabinet system of the British colonies. It might retain the separation from the legislature of the executive governor, elected by the people, and exercising his veto on their behalf, and yet dispense altogether with a rigid fundamental constitution, being content to vest in its representatives and governor the plenitude of its own powers. This, however, no American state does, or has ever done, or is likely to do. And the question why it does not suggests a point of interest for Europeans as well as for Americans.

      In the republics of the ancient world, where representative assemblies were unknown, legislative power rested with the citizens meeting in what we should now call primary assemblies, such as the Ecclesia of Syracuse or the Comitia of Rome. The same plan prevailed in the early Teutonic tribes, where the assembly of the freemen exercised all such powers as did not belong to the king. The laws of the kings of the Angles and Saxons, the capitularies of Charlemagne, were promulgated in assemblies of the nation, and may be said, though emanating from the prince, to have been enacted by the people. During the Middle Ages, these ancient assemblies died out, and the right of making laws passed either to the sovereign or to a representative assembly surrounding the sovereign, such as the English Parliament, the older scheme surviving only in such primitive communities as some of the Swiss cantons. The first reappearance in modern Europe of the scheme of direct legislation by the people is, so far as I know, the provision of the French Constitution framed by the National Convention in 1793, which directs that any law proposed by the legislative body shall be published and sent to all the communes of the Republic, whose primary assemblies shall be convoked to vote upon it, in case objections to it have been raised by one-tenth of these primary assemblies in a majority of the departments. In recent times the plan has become familiar by its introduction, not only into most of the cantons of Switzerland, but into the Swiss Federal Republic, which constantly applies it, under the name of referendum, by submitting to the vote of the people laws passed by the federal legislature.²

      In Britain the influence of the same idea may be discovered in two phenomena of recent years. One is the proposal frequently made to refer to the direct vote of the inhabitants of a town or other local area the enactment of some ordinance affecting that district: as, for instance, one determining whether a rate shall be levied for a free library, or whether licences shall be granted for the sale, within the district, of intoxicating liquors. This method of deciding an issue, commonly known as local option, is a species of referendum. It differs from the Swiss form, not merely in being locally restricted, but rather in the fact that it is put to the people, not for the sake of confirming an act of the legislature, but of deciding whether a particular act shall be operative in a given area. But the principle is the same; it is a transference of legislative authority from a representative body, whether the parliament of the nation or the municipal council of the town (as the case may be), to the voters at the polls.

      The other English illustration may seem far fetched, but on examination will be seen to involve the same idea. It is now beginning to be maintained as a constitutional doctrine, that when any large measure of change is carried through the House of Commons, the House of Lords has a right to reject it for the purpose of compelling a dissolution of Parliament, that is, an appeal to the voters. The doctrine is as warmly denied as it is asserted; but the material point is that many educated men contend that the House of Commons is not morally, though of course it is legally, entitled to pass a bill seriously changing the Constitution, which was not submitted to the electors at the preceding general election. A general election, although in form a choice of particular persons as members, has now practically become an expression of popular opinion on the two or three leading measures then propounded and discussed by the party leaders, as well as a vote of confidence or no confidence in the ministry of the day. It is in substance a vote upon those measures; although, of course, a vote only on their general principles, and not, like the Swiss referendum, upon the statute which the legislature has passed. Even therefore in a country which clings to and founds itself upon the absolute supremacy of its representative chamber, the notion of a direct appeal to the people has made progress.³

      In the United States, which I need hardly say has in this matter been nowise affected by France or Switzerland or England, but has developed on its own lines, the conception that the people (i.e., the citizens at large) are and ought of right to be the supreme legislators, has taken the form of legislation by enacting or amending a constitution. Instead of, like the Swiss, submitting ordinary laws to the voters after they have passed the legislature, the Americans take subjects which belong to ordinary legislation out of the category of statutes, place them in the constitution, and then handle them as parts of this fundamental instrument. They are not called laws; but laws they are to all intents and purposes, differing from statutes only in being enacted by an authority which is not a constant but an occasional body, called into action only when a convention or a legislature lays propositions before it.

      I have already explained the historical origin of this system, how it sprang from the fact that the constitutions of the colonies having been given to them by an external authority superior to the colonial legislature, the people of each state, seeing that they could no longer obtain changes in their constitution from Britain, assumed to themselves the right and duty of remodelling it; putting the collective citizendom of the state into the place of the British Crown as sovereign. The business of creating or remodelling an independent commonwealth was to their thinking too great a matter to be left to the ordinary organs of state life. This feeling, which had begun to grow from 1776 onwards, was much strengthened by the manner in which the federal Constitution was enacted in 1788 by state conventions. It seemed to have thus received a specially solemn ratification; and even the federal legislature, which henceforth was the centre of national politics, was placed far beneath the document which expressed the will of the people as a whole.

      As the Republic went on working out both in theory and in practice those conceptions of democracy and popular sovereignty which had been only vaguely apprehended when enunciated at the Revolution, the faith of the average man in himself became stronger, his love of equality greater, his desire, not only to rule, but to rule directly in his own proper person, more constant. These sentiments would have told still further upon state governments had they not found large scope in local government. However, even in state affairs they made it (in the Northern states) an article of faith that no constitution could be enacted save by the direct vote of the citizens; and they inclined the citizens to seize such chances as occurred of making laws for themselves in their own way. Concurrently with the growth of these tendencies there had been a decline in the quality of the state legislatures, and of the legislation which they turned out. They were regarded with less respect; they inspired less confidence. Hence the people had the further excuse СКАЧАТЬ