There is no doubt that large manufacturing and commercial concerns do exert themselves to secure the election to the House, and perhaps to the Senate, of persons who are practically their direct representatives, their chief business in Congress being the shaping of favourable legislation or the warding off of that which would be disadvantageous to the interests which are behind them. Undoubtedly also such large concerns, or associated groups of them, can bring considerable pressure to bear upon individual members in divers ways, and there have been notorious cases wherein it has been shown that this pressure has been unscrupulously used. Except in the case of the railways, which have only a secondary interest in tariff legislation, this particular abuse must be charged to the account of the protective policy, and its development in some measure would perhaps be inevitable in any country where a similar policy prevailed.
In the British Parliament there are, of course, few important lines of trade or industry which are not abundantly represented, and both Houses contain railway directors and others who speak frankly as the representatives of railway interests, and lose thereby nothing of the respect of the country or their fellow-members. It is not possible here to explain in detail why the assumption, which prevails in America, that a railway company is necessarily a public enemy, and that any argument in favour of such a corporation is an argument against the public welfare, does not obtain in England. It will be necessary later on not only to refer to the fact that fear of capitalism is immensely stronger in America than it is in England, but also to explain why there is good reason why it should be so. For the present, it is enough to note that it is possible for members of Parliament to do, without incurring a shadow of suspicion of their integrity, things which would damn a member of Congress irreparably in the eyes alike of his colleagues and of the country. There is hardly a railway bill passed through Parliament the supporters of which would not in its passage through Congress have to run the gauntlet of all manner of insinuation and abuse; and when the sensational press of the United States raises a hue and cry of "Steal!" in regard to a particular measure, the Englishman (until he understands the difference in the conditions in the two countries) may be bewildered by finding on investigation that the bill is one entirely praiseworthy which would pass through Parliament as a matter of course, the only justification for the outcry being that the legislation is likely, perhaps most indirectly, to prove advantageous to some particular industry or locality. The fact that the measure is just and deserving of support on merely patriotic grounds is immaterial, when party capital can be made from such an outcry. I have on more than one occasion known entirely undeserved suffering to be inflicted in this way on men of the highest character who were acting from none but disinterested motives; and he who would have traffic with large affairs in the United States must early learn to grow callous to newspaper abuse.
In wider and more general ways than have yet been noticed, however, the members of Congress are subjected to undue influences in a measure far beyond anything known to the members of Parliament.
In the colonial days, governors not seldom complained of the law by which members of the provincial assemblies could only be elected to sit for the towns or districts in which they actually resided. The same law once prevailed in England, but it was repealed in the time of George III., and had been disregarded in practice since the days of Elizabeth.[247:1] Under the Constitution of the United States it is, however, still necessary that a member of Congress should be a resident (or "inhabitant") of the State from which he is elected. In some States it is the law that he must reside in the particular district of the State which elects him, and custom has made this the rule in all. A candidate rejected by his own constituency, therefore, cannot stand for another; and it follows that a member who desires to continue in public life must hold the good will of his particular locality.
So entirely is this accepted as a matter of course that any other system (the British system for instance) seems to the great majority of Americans quite unnatural and absurd; and it has the obvious immediate advantage that each member does more truly "represent" his particular constituents than is likely to be the case when he sits for a borough or a Division in which he may never have set foot until he began to canvas it. On the other hand, it is an obvious disadvantage that when a member for any petty local reason forfeits the good will of his own constituency, his services, no matter how valuable they may be, are permanently lost to the State.
The term for which a member of the Lower House is elected in America is only two years, so that a member who has any ambition for a continuous legislative career must, almost from the day of his election, begin to consider the chance of being re-elected. As this depends altogether on his ability to hold the gratitude of his one constituency, it is inevitable that he should become more or less engrossed in the effort to serve the local needs; and a constituency, or the party leaders in a constituency, generally, indeed, measure a man's availability for re-election by what is called his "usefulness."
If you ask a politician of local authority whether the sitting member is a good one, he will reply, "No; he hasn't any influence at Washington at all. He can't do a thing for us!" Or, "Yes, he's pretty good; he seems to get things through all right." The "things" which the member "gets through" may be the appointment of residents of the district to minor government positions, the securing of appropriations of public moneys for such works as the dredging or widening of a river channel to the advantage of the district or the improvement of the local harbour, and the passage of bills providing for the erection in the district of new post-offices or other government buildings. Many other measures may, of course, be of direct local interest; but a member's chief opportunities for earning the gratitude of his constituency fall under the three categories enumerated.
It is obvious that two years is too short a term for any but an exceptionally gifted man to make his mark, either in the eyes of his colleagues or of his constituency, by conspicuous national services. Even if achieved, it is doubtful if in the eyes of the majority of the constituencies (or the leaders in those constituencies) any such impalpable distinction would be held to compensate for a demonstrated inability to get the proper share of local advantages. The result is that while the member of Parliament may be said to consider himself primarily as a member of his party and his chief business to be that of co-operating with that party in securing the conduct of National affairs according to the party beliefs, the member of Congress considers himself primarily as the representative of his district and his chief business to be the securing for that district of as many plums from the Federal pie as possible.
Out of these conditions has developed the prevalence of log-rolling in Congress: "You vote for my post-office and I'll help you with your harbour appropriation." Such exchange of courtesies is continual and, I think, universal. The annual River and Harbour Bill (which last year appropriated $25,414,000 of public money for all manner of works in all corners of the country) is an amazing legislative product.
Another result is that the individual member must hold himself constantly alert to find what his "people" at home want: always on the lookout for signs of approval or disapproval from his constituency. And the constituency on its side does not hesitate to let him know just what it thinks of him and precisely what jobs it requires him to do at any given moment. Nor is it the constituency as a whole, through its recognised party leaders, which alone thinks that it has a right to instruct, direct, or influence its representative, but individuals of sufficient political standing to consider themselves entitled to have their private interest looked after, manufacturing and business concerns the payrolls of which support a large number of voters, labour unions, and all sorts of societies and organisations of various kinds—they one and all assert their right to advise the Congressman in his policies or to call for his assistance in furthering their particular ends, under threat, tacit or expressed, of the loss of their support when he seeks re-election. The English member of Parliament thinks that he is subjected to a sufficiency of pressure of this particular sort; but he has not to bear one-tenth of what is daily meted out to his American confrère, nor is he under any similar necessity of paying attention to it.
