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I. C. DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AND IDEAS

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BEGINNING OF CABINET GOVERNMENT 1

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

IN outer seeming the Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the sovereignty over England from James to William and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful and decisive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was transferring the sovereignty from the King to the House of Commons. From the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons became the supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently to suspend its sittings or in the long run to oppose its will when either course must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the army and navy, and in suspending the public service. But though the constitutional change was complete, the machinery of government was far from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life which such a change brought about. However powerful the will of the House of Commons might be, it had no means of bringing its will directly to bear upon the conduct of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them were not its servants, but the servants of the Crown; it was from the King that they looked for direction, and to the King that they held themselves responsible. By impeachment or more indirect means the Commons could force a King to remove a Minister who contradicted their will; but they had no constitutional power to replace the fallen statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will.

1 From A History of the English People, Book VIII, Chap. III.

The result was the growth of a temper in the Lower House which drove William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the practical difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they possess. It grumbled at the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; and it blamed the Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to find out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its mood changed, as William bitterly complained, with every hour. His own hold over it grew less day by day. It was only through great pressure that he succeeded in defeating by a majority of two a Place Bill which would have rendered all his servants and Ministers incapable of sitting in the Commons. He was obliged to use his veto to defeat a Triennial Bill which, as he believed, would have destroyed what little stability of purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate information, and destitute of that organization out of which alone a definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn political capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the later days of Charles the Second; and he had remained Minister through almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last only by compliance with the worst tyranny of his master and by a feigned conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, but the ruin of James was no sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection from William by the betrayal of the master to whom he had sacrificed his conscience and his honor. Since the Revolution Sunderland had striven only to escape public observation in a country retirement, but at this crisis he came secretly forward to bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the King.

His counsel was to recognize practically the new power of the Commons by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower House.

As yet no Ministry in the modern sense of the term had existed. Each great officer of State, Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy Seal, had in theory been independent of his fellowofficers; each was the "King's servant" and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the King alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might tower above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course of government, but the predominance was merely personal and never permanent; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were ready to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was common for the King to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any communication with the rest; and so far was even William from aiming at Ministerial unity that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunderland's plan aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous Ministry, chosen from the same party, representing the same sentiments, and bound together for common action by a sense of responsibility and loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not only was such a plan likely to secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons which it had never had before. The Ministers who were representative of the majority of its members became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions were drawn together into the two great parties which supported or opposed the Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long vexed both Kings and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name to be the King's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from

one side of the House to the other. Such was the origin of that system of representative government which has gone on from Sunderland's day to our own.

THE ÆSTHETIC VALUE OF EFFICIENCY 1

ETHEL PUFFER HOWES

THIS is not an essay in criticism. It is an argument from example; containing also the personal observations of an unabashed æsthetician, who takes her own where she finds it. A living organism of industry, all compact of social values, may be truly an æsthetic whole. It may have beauty transcending a multitude of partial uglinesses, not because it is good, but because its excellence shows the form of perfect unity. That harmony of potent action, that blending of mutual influences, which, in symphony or drama, makes it difficult to disentangle cause and effect, is an unfailing mark, in the conduct of life no less, of the presence of the aesthetic quality. If "all art aspires to the condition of music," certainly all to which we can ascribe beauty is known by such a fusion of efficient action and results as I mean to try to tell of here. The very difficulty of the task is warrant of the quality of the subject.

It was certainly with no undue expectations of charm or inspiration that I alighted at Vateria, after a night in which dark phantoms of round-topped Southern pines had marched slowly and continuously by the window of my berth. From Washington down, the journey had revealed untidy houses, idle negroes, unkempt whites. The Southerner of Nicholas Worth was in my literary baggage, and, like a character out of the book, a distinguished Georgian had on the way assured me, "You know all this hookworm talk is just to keep capital away from the South." And the first aspect of the town held in its unloveliness nothing unforeseen. All about were fields of blackened and ragged

1 From The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1912. Reprinted by permission.

stumps, showing where the magnificent pine forests had once stood. The.fine new schoolhouses and bank were shouldered by shabby shingled relics of the earlier mushroom growth; and when a yellow cow came strolling along the sidewalk seeking what she might devour, it seemed that the last touch of character had been given. Only the wonderful aromatic fragrance of the cut long-leaf pine, which filled the air, gave intimation of a quality soon to be revealed - a truly symbolic note of beauty.

For the place I shall call Vateria is a Mississippi lumber town. It is also one of the most remarkable communities of the New South, in which a strain of power and self-completeness strangely dominates our academic notion of outward civic beauty. There is, indeed, an authentic and virile charm in the spectacle of its common life; but it can be clearly envisaged only in some interpretation of the unusual forces at work there for some twenty years past.

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One who knew what other Southern lumber towns were like ten or more years ago, before the leaven of Vateria had worked throughout the Gulf States, would have earlier discerned its quality. In those days, not yet ended indeed, the lumberman came in only to exploit and to destroy. A sawmill was built on the railroad, a logging-camp of violent and often vicious men profaned the forest. The country people furnished few workers to either mill or camp. It was a dissipated and irregular life, and a shifting crew. The common saying went that a camp had three crews one coming, one going, one at work." No families were ever taken into the woods, and all the vices flourished there, with at least the tacit encouragement of the owners; for though ostensibly high wages were paid, it was expected that most of this would return to the company either directly through the high prices the men were compelled to pay at the commissary (company store), or indirectly through the leasing of this privilege of exploitation. Like the turpentine camp of to-day, it was a synonym for almost intolerable conditions. No land was taken up in the town by employees, no houses built; but when the timber was cut off to such a distance

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