638 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cVetat by a party which wanted to drive the Government to a dissolu- 

 tion. Any notion that a nominated Senate will be the serene abode of 

 high character, or special knowledge, or commercial authority, such as 

 shrinks from electoral contests, is belied by the experience of Canada, 

 where the Senate is a mere infirmary for superannuated partisans, 

 especially for such as have spent money for the party elections. Where 

 the Senate is elective, and the authority of the nation is divided, in 

 whatever proportions, between the two Houses, collision is certain to 

 ensue, sooner or later ; as it has in Victoria, as it did in France when, 

 on the famous 16th of May, the country was in this manner brought 

 to the verge of revolution. Collision is not the calm review of legis- 

 lation, nor has it any tendency that way ; its tendency is to political 

 convulsions. Political convulsions are the almost inevitable result of 

 an attempt to divide the national will and to make it manifest itself 

 through two independent organs, sure soon, if it were only from cor- 

 porate jealousy, to become antagonistic. Where harmony has been 

 preserved, it has been due to the ascendency of the same party in both 

 branches of the Legislature, a condition of things which is always pre- 

 carious, while, if what has been said of the party system generally is 

 true, that system can not be relied on as the sustaining or controlling 

 force of any polity for the future. The whole theory of mechanical 

 checks and balances, however consecrated, is unsound ; it belongs to 

 the times of jealousy between monarchs and their subjects ; the hope 

 of a commonwealth lies in the more genial policy of disposing all its 

 members to the common wood. Methods of securing deliberate action 

 may be devised in the interest of all ; but no ingenuity can really de- 

 vise a method of permanently dividing the national will and making 

 it check itself. 



To secure deliberate action, the first thing necessary is to have the 

 wisest men of the country in that assembly which represents the will 

 of the nation. But haste may be also prevented, and time given for 

 reflection and for change of mind, by arrangement of the forms of 

 legislation. It might be desirable even to confer a suspensive veto for 

 a short period on a stated minority. Such an expedient would at least 

 be more effective than the obsolete veto of the Crown, and less disturb- 

 ing to the political frame than a collision between the Commons and 

 the Lords, out of which the only way is a coercive dissolution of Par- 

 liament in the midst of a boiling agitation, or a swamping creation of 

 Peers. 



The question whether an individual chief of the state is necessary 

 concerns most the American Republic. It is at present complicated 

 by the exigencies of party, which requires a chief as an army re- 

 quires a general though such a minister as Lord Aberdeen was 

 hardly more than the president of a council. In Switzerland an 

 example which, for the reason already given, is always to be cited 

 with reserve there is only a titular President of the Federal Council, 



