Handbook of Home Rule eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 329 pages of information about Handbook of Home Rule.

Handbook of Home Rule eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 329 pages of information about Handbook of Home Rule.
and that the plan would be unexceptionable but for the fatal power of regulating the times and places of election.  An objector in a large state exclaims loudly against the unreasonable equality of representation in the Senate.  An objector in a small state is equally loud against the dangerous inequality in the House of Representatives.  From one quarter we are alarmed with the amazing expense, from the number of persons who are to administer the new government.  From another quarter, and sometimes from the same quarter, on another occasion the cry is that the Congress will be but the shadow of a representation, and that the government would be far less objectionable if the number and the expense were doubled.  A patriot in a state that does not import or export discerns insuperable objections against the power of direct taxation.  The patriotic adversary in a state of great exports and imports is not less dissatisfied that the whole burden of taxes may be thrown on consumption.  This politician discovers in the constitution a direct and irresistible tendency to monarchy.  That is equally sure it will end in aristocracy.  Another is puzzled to say which of these shapes it will ultimately assume, but sees clearly it must be one or other of them.  Whilst a fourth is not wanting, who with no less confidence affirms that the Constitution is so far from having a bias towards either of these dangers, that the weight on that side will not be sufficient to keep it upright and firm against the opposite propensities.  With another class of adversaries to the Constitution, the language is, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments are intermixed in such a manner as to contradict all the ideas of regular government and all the requisite precautions in favour of liberty.  Whilst this objection circulates in vague and general expressions, there are not a few who lend their sanction to it.  Let each one come forward with his particular explanation, and scarcely any two are exactly agreed on the subject.  In the eyes of one the junction of the Senate with the President in the responsible function of appointing to offices, instead of vesting this power in the executive alone, is the vicious part of the organization.  To another the exclusion of the House of Representatives, whose numbers alone could be a due security against corruption and partiality in the exercise of such a power, is equally obnoxious.  With a third the admission of the President into any share of a power which must ever be a dangerous engine in the hands of the executive magistrate is an unpardonable violation of the maxims of republican jealousy.  No part of the arrangement, according to some, is more inadmissible than the trial of impeachments by the Senate, which is alternately a member both of the legislative and executive departments, when this power so evidently belonged to the judiciary department.  We concur fully, reply others, in the objection to this part of the plan, but we can never agree that a reference of impeachments to the judiciary authority would be an amendment of the error; our principal dislike to the organization arises from the extensive powers already lodged in that department.  Even among the zealous patrons of a council of state, the most irreconcilable variance is discovered concerning the mode in which it ought to be constituted.”

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Handbook of Home Rule from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.