A Comparison of Systems
AT the time of his death, in 19v, Mr. Stannard, a distinguished historian and a member of the staff of The Times, had substantially completed this book, which has been admirably prepared for the press by Mr. John Filmer. The decision to publish his essay was wise because it contains many ideas that are interesting, a number that are original and some that are startling. It may perhaps be said that this would have been a more coherent book if the author had been less concerned with history. The four pages which are devoted to the almost forgotten Cromwellian Instrument of Government, in which an attempt was made to create a written constitution for Great Britain, are interesting, but they are in large part irrelevant because there was not a single reference to this Instrument in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention which created the American Constitution in 1787. Nor does the suggestion that the election of the American Presidents has some historical connection with the election of kings in early times seem a convincing one. Perhaps the most surprising statement is that " in practice the American President is very nearly the Tudor monarch with certain eighteenth-century refinements," for the resemblance between the activities of Henry VIII and Franklin D. Roosevelt is not an obvious one.
Mr. Stannard seems to have assumed that the Founders of the Constitution adopted the Presidential system of government, with its clear-cut division between the executive and the legislature, because they did not understand the Cabinet system of government as it had been developing in England during the eighteenth century. It is open to doubt whether the Founders did not know what they were doing, and it is not at all certain that, if they were creating an American Constitution today, they would not follow the same plan as that accepted in 1787. It is obvious that the Cabinet system is more efficient as an instrument of government than the Presidential one ; but, on the other hand, it means that extraordinary powers are concentrated in the hands of a small body of men, especially today, when it is unlikely that a Ministry will be opposed by its own part' members. Many Americans feel that their system is more democratic because it prevents a small temporary majority from dominating a minority. It is not over-rigid, as some foreign commentators suggest, for when the people arc really in favour of radical legislation, as happened in 1933 at the time of the New Deal, this can be enacted in a brief period. It may be suggested that Mr. Stannard occasionally exaggerated the defects of the Constitution because he placed more emphasis on its words than on its practice. This is an easy error to make, for an American might be misled by legislative forms into the belief that the King could refuse his consent to a statute as freely as a President can veto Congressional legislation. On paper the American machine can be brought to a halt, but in fact it continues to function by means of extra-constitutional devices such as the joint committees of Congress. Mr. Stannard strongly disapproved of the American
Convention that a member of the House of Representatives must be a resident in the Congressional district for which he is returned, and he reached the conclusion that " this arrangement is largely responsible for the weakness of the House of Representatives as compared with the House of Commons." Even if we accept the stock view that the American Representative is on the average less able than the Member of Parliament—and it may be said in paren- thesis that the truth of this view is not self-evident today—the residence rule has little to do with this result because the least able Representatives may come from the large cities where the leaders of industry and of the professions live. The difficulty in the past has been to induce these men to concern themselves with politics because until recently business was more important in America than government.
Mr. Stannard reaches the conclusion that, although the two consti- tutions stand in sharp contrast to one another, nevertheless they have a unity of purpose, "always reaching towards the same ends by diverse means, but always holding out to free men the hope and promise of free lives in a free world." It is to be hoped that this statement will be as true in a hundred years as it is today.
A. L. GOODHART.
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