upon. The Senate has retained its early rules of procedure without material alteration. It is still a place of free and prolonged debate. It will not curtail the privilege of its members to say what they please, at whatever length. But the senators are comparatively few in number; they can afford the indulgence. The House cannot. The Senate may remain individualistic, atomistic, but the House must be organic, an efficient instrument, not a talkative assembly.

III. A numerous body like the House of Representatives is naturally and of course unfit for organic, creative action through debate. Debate, indeed, is not a creative process. It is critical. It does not produce; it tests. A large assembly cannot form policies or formulate measures, and the House of Representatives is merely a large assembly, like any other public meeting in its unfitness for business. Like other public meetings, it must send committees out to formulate its resolves. It organizes itself, therefore, into committees, not occasional committees, formed from time to time, but standing committees permanently charged with its business and given every prerogative of suggestion and explanation, in order that each piece of legislative business may be systematically attended to by a body small enough to digest and perfect it.

III A. For each important subject of legislation there is a standing committee. There is, for example, a Committee on Appropriations, a Committee on Ways and Means, that is, on the sources and objects of taxation, a Committee on Banking and Currency, a Committee on Commerce, a Committee on Manufactures, a Committee on Agriculture, a Committee on Railways and Canals, a Committee on Rivers and Harbors, a Committee on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries, a Committee on the Judiciary, a Committee on Foreign Affairs, a Committee on Public Lands, a Committee on Land Claims, a Committee on War Claims, a Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, a Committee on Military Affairs, a Committee on Naval Affairs, a Committee on Indian Affairs, a Committee on Education, a Committee on Labor, the business likely to be brought to the attention of the House being thoroughly, indeed somewhat

minutely, classified and the committees being some fifty-seven

in number.

IV. Every bill introduced must be sent to a committee. It would probably be impossible to think of any legitimate subject for legislation upon which a bill could be drawn up for whose consideration no standing committee has been provided. If a new subject should turn up, the House would no doubt presently create a new committee. The thousands of bills annually introduced are promptly distributed, therefore; go almost automatically to the several committees; and as automatically, it must be added, disappear. The measures reported to the House are measures which the committees formulate. They may find some member's bill suitable and acceptable, and report it substantially unchanged, or they may pull it about and alter it, or they may throw it aside altogether and frame a measure of their own, or they may do nothing, make no report at all. Few bills ever see the light again after being referred to a committee. The business of the House is what the Committees choose to make it. What the House of Commons depends upon its committee, the Government, to do, the House depends upon its fifty-seven committees to do. The private member's bill has a little better chance, indeed, of being debated in the Commons than in the House of Representatives. The House of Commons does usually set aside one day a week for the consideration of private members' bills, when the Government is not pressed for time and does not insist upon using every day itself; and those members who are fortunate enough to draw first places in the make-up of the calendars for those days may have the pleasure of getting their proposals debated and voted upon. But in the House of Representatives there is only the very slender chance of getting the rules suspended, an irregularity which the business-like chamber has grown very shy of permitting. V. The very complexity and bulk of all this machinery is itself burdensome to the House. There are now more than half as many committees in the House as there are members of the Senate. It cannot itself choose so many committees; it cannot even follow so many. It therefore entrusts every appointment

to the Speaker, and, when its business gets entangled amongst the multitude of committees and reports, follows a steering committee, which it calls the Committee on Rules. And the power of appointing the committees, which the House has conferred upon its Speaker, makes him the almost autocratic master of its actions.

VI. In all legislative bodies except ours the presiding officer has only the powers and functions of a chairman. He is separate from parties and is looked to to be punctiliously impartial. He moderates and gives order to the course of debate, and is expected to administer without personal or party bias the accepted rules of its procedure. For political guidance all other representative assemblies depend on the Government, not upon committees which their presiding officer has created. But the processes of our parliamentary development have made the Speaker of our great House of Representatives and the Speakers of our State Legislatures party leaders in whom centres the control of all that they do. So far as the House of Representatives and its share in the public business is concerned, the Speaker is undisputed party leader.

VI A, B, C. Every one of the committees of the House the Speaker appoints. He not only allows himself to make them up with a view to the kind of legislation he wishes to see enacted; he is expected to make them up with such a view, is expected to make them up as a party leader would. He is, it is true, a good deal hampered in the exercise of a free choice in their make-up by certain well-established understandings and precedents, of whose breach the older members of the House at any rate would be very jealous. Seniority of service has to be respected in assigning places on the more important committees, and the succession to certain of the chief chairmanships is well understood to go by definite rules of individual preference and personal consideration. But it is always possible for the Speaker to determine the majority of his appointments in such a way as to give him that direct and continuing control of the actions of the House which he is now expected to exercise as the party leader of the majority. Even his own personal views upon particular public questions

he does not hesitate to enforce in his appointments, so that the very majority he represents may be prevented from having an opportunity to vote upon measures it is known to desire because he has made up the committees which would report upon them in accordance with his own preferences in the matter. What the committees do not report the House cannot vote upon. Every bill that is introduced is assigned to a committee picked out by the Speaker's order, if there be any doubt about its character or reference. It is the Speaker's decision, also, that assigns the reports of the committees to the several calendars upon which the business of the House is allotted its time for consideration, and he may often choose whether the place allotted them shall be favorable or unfavorable, shall make it likely or unlikely that they will be reached at all.

VID. Moreover, it has come about that by means of his prerogative of "recognition" the Speaker is permitted to control debate to a very extraordinary degree. It is common parliamentary practice that no one can address an assembly until "recognized," that is, accorded the floor, by the presiding officer. The House of Representatives, feeling always pressed for time, even with regard to the consideration of the reports of its standing committees, which are numerous and amazingly active, restricts debate upon those reports within very narrow limits, and generally allots the greater part of the brief time allowed to any one report to the chairman of the reporting committee. Other members may get a few minutes of time allowed them by previous arrangement with the committee's chairman, and a list of those who are thus to be given an opportunity to speak generally lies on the Speaker's desk. These members the Speaker will "recognize," but no others, though they spring to their feet under his very nose in the open space in front of the seats, unless, indeed, they have seen him beforehand and got his permission. No member who has not previously arranged the matter, either with the chairman of the committee or with the Speaker, need rise or seek to catch the Speaker's eye. And in the intervals of calendar business no one whose intention the Speaker has not been apprised of, unless indeed

it be the leader on the floor of the one party or the other, may expect to be accorded the floor to make a motion. The Speaker may, if he choose, determine what proposals he will permit the House to hear.

VI E. The Committee on Rules has of recent years had a very singular and significant development of functions. Originally its duty was a very simple one: that of reporting to the House at the opening of each of its biennial sessions, when a new House assembles and a new organization is effected, the body of standing rules under which it was to act; for the House goes through the form of readopting its whole body of rules each time it reorganizes after fresh congressional elections. From session to session the rules were modified, now in one particular, again in another, on the recommendation of the committee; and any change in the rules at any time proposed is still referred to it for consideration and report. But now the committee is looked to, besides, for such temporary orders and programs of procedure as will enable the House to disentangle its business and get at the measures which the country expects it to dispose of or the needs of the Government make it necessary that it should not neglect. The party majority is well aware that, if it would keep its credit with the constituencies, it must not allow the miscellany of committee reports on its crowded calendars to stand in the way of matters which it is pledged to act upon. It looks to the Committee on Rules to sweep aside the ordinary rules of procedure whenever necessary, and bring in a schedule of action which will enable it to get at the main things it is interested in, or at any rate the things the party leaders think it most expedient it should dispose of. The committee has thus become a very important part of party machinery. It consists of five members, the Speaker himself, two other representatives of the majority, and two representatives of the minority. The majority members of course control its action; the representation of the minority is hardly more than formal; and the two members of the majority associated with the Speaker upon it are usually trusted lieutenants upon whom he can count for loyal support of his leadership. One self-confident Speaker