Nearly every writer on American government has commented adversely on the fact that appropriations are made by congress each year without a budget. Foreigners have frequently said that they are at a loss to know how we get along without a budget. One hundred and twenty-four years of experience of this kind should be significant. Would it not be well for us to answer the implied interrogatory, in our own minds at least, by considering how we have been getting along.

The limit of budgetary control becomes a legal question only where the attempt is made by a written constitution or a statute to distinguish between powers of a policy determining character which are vested in a budget making authority and powers of a policy executing character which are vested in an authority possessed of executive or administrative functions only. The questions to which a discussion of the reciprocal relations of such independent authorities may give rise are in the case of the national congress and of a state legislature, constitutional and therefore legal in character. Nevertheless they are not of a justiciable nature, since neither the congress nor the state legislature is subject from this point of view to the control of the courts (see United States vs. Gratiot, 4 How. 81, where it is said: “A specific appropriation could not be diverted from its object”). The national congress or a state legislature may, therefore, in the absence of specific constitutional limitations grant to the administrative authorities, to which is entrusted the expenditure of public moneys, very great discretion in such expenditure, both from the viewpoint of the period of time during which the expenditure may without further authorization continue to be made and from that of its purpose or of the object for which it may be made. Or on the other hand, the budget making authority may prescribe the period of availability of each appropriation, or the specific purpose or object of expenditure in such detail as to make the function of administration a merely ministerial one.

That congress is to be the body that should finally determine the amount of money to be available each year for the support of the various branches of government no one questions. In exercising this function, however, congress has open to it a wide range of discretion. It can do as the British parliament did for centuries after it had taken to itself the power of the purse, vote a lump sum, or, what was the same thing, the total product of certain taxes, for the support of the government, leaving it to the executive—the crown—to apply this sum to the various objects of government as its discretion dictated. Or it can do, as parliament now does, specify in general terms the manner in which this total shall be distributed among the several branches of government, leaving to the executive the authority to allot these sums more specifically. Or, finally, it can do, as congress now in great part does, attempt to set forth in the greatest practicable detail the precise manner in which the sums voted shall be applied.

Efficiency and economy in government involve in a large measure the question of budget control, and in the formulation of the budget, as well as in the carrying out of its provisions, the executive and legislative departments of government are brought into close relationship. The budget is the government's fiscal plan; it is the forecast of the receipts and expenditures for a terminable period. It should exhibit the amount of revenue to be raised in accordance with the plan and show the sources from which these funds are to be drawn, as well as the purposes of all expenditures. There must not only be a buget balance—a correlation of the estimated revenues and the expenditures of the state—but the proposed expenditures should be comparable, so that it may be easily determined how much it is proposed to grant for each of the several services. This necessitates the formulation by a central agency of a fiscal policy.

Leaving out of account the eighteenth century natural-law thinking which still persists in some quarters, we may say that until recently Anglo-American jurists stood for a political interpretation of jurisprudence. English jurists maintain that position today. But the present fashion in America seems to be an economic interpretation. Not only is such an interpretation insisted on by many juristic writers, but nearly all recent discussions of judicial organization and of judicial power with respect to legislation proceed upon that basis. We have, then, two prevailing types of thinking in this country on the part of those who purport to treat the law scientifically. The one type is represented by the historical school, and is idealistic and political. The other type is represented by a phase of the sociological school—an early phase if we look at the development of that school the world over—and is mechanical and economic. The former looks on law as something which is found. It holds law to be something discovered rather than made. The latter looks on law as a product of the human will. The latter is an imperative theory, the former is not. Thus the distinction between these two types of thinking connects itself at once with a controversy that has gone on since the beginnings of juristic science.

The essential necessity and inherent importance of a broad constructive political theory is coming once again to be recognized. Over-emphasized and misapplied in the eighteenth century, a natural reaction against political philosophy characterized the nineteenth century. The swing of the pendulum is carrying us back in this present time once more to the appreciation of the value and importance of rational, synthetic generalizations regarding the state. The analytical, dispersive and monographic method of historical and political studies achieved great and lasting results, but today the general view, the broader vision, the deeper meaning, the larger unity are receiving increasing attention. We shall not abandon the positive results in scientific accuracy and wealth of data which detailed studies of institutions have afforded, but we shall insist more and more in the future upon interpretations which shall link together the results of scholarly research and provide us with a more profound and comprehensive knowledge of the truth. Not a revival of the a priori speculations of the eighteenth century, but a thoroughly inductive and scientific theory of the state is the highest aim and purpose of twentieth century political science.

The cynic's retort to the advocate of good government is “Your government is as good as you make it; why, therefore, fret yourself with dreams you have failed to realize!” The retort is easily answered. “Good” means better, and “you” looks as far into the past as good does into the future. Such degree of betterment in government as we enjoy today is not due alone to the desires or activities of the present generation, but to the cumulated efforts of all, past and present, who have contributed to the enlightenment of mankind in the field of political science and in the art of governing. Likewise what we of this generation may think or do will bear fruit, some today and some long after our generation has paṡsed away. The vision of today becomes the reality of tomorrow. If our cynical friend demands proof, point him to the history of men and institutions. If he dwells upon the accounts of evil doing, personal and public, with which the daily press is filled, bid him contrast, for example, the cities of the twentieth century with those of the eighteenth, marking especially the change in public sentiment in England since 1835, in the United States since 1880, and take courage.

I do not wish to discuss these questions from a partisan point of view; for I am by no means opposed to all of them. But some study of the history of English legislation has made me appreciate not only the lack of novelty of these processes, but that there is a lesson to be drawn from the study of those early times, when in fact they were the usual method of making, of interpreting, and of executing, law. Our knowledge of these matters has come to us recently, mostly from the efforts of German scholars. We learn nothing from Blackstone; while even writers of the Bentham-Austin School wrote in more or less complete ignorance of the past history of Anglo-Saxon institutions, and with thought processes consciously or unconsciously based on the later Roman law. And so there is a school today, that would make the executive all powerful, not merely in the administration of government, but in declaring and executing the law; having as an object efficiency, not liberty, with institutions based on a benevolent State, not on a democratic people. Such schemes are ever attractive as a short cut to-results, particularly so in this country where the best meant efforts of a central government are sometimes controlled and dissipated by the local government of the States. This, however, is a larger question; I shall henceforth confine myself to the four or five precise reforms which have been recently recommended to us.

No one has yet given any careful attention to the vice-presidency on its historical bearings. Indeed, if one may judge by the opinions if writers who have touched upon the theme, it would seem to be hardly worth consideration. Within recent years there has been a good deal of free discussion of the vice-presidential office, chiefly, it would appear for the purpose of trying to supply the second officer of the national government with something to do. The ideal of the office as a sinecure is not only widespread but old. The office, it is said, offers nothing attractive to men of first-rate capacity. At this point, some one is sure to recall John Adams's reflection of December, 1793, when he wrote that “my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. And as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet the common fate.” It may be desirable at the outset to call attention to several other well-known opinions.

To democratize industry and politics, we must, among other things, democratize the political party; to democratize the political party we must among other things control its purse.

Here, as elsewhere, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Your campaign contributor may be never so public spirited your party treasurer may be never so scrupulous, and yet when the need of money is urgent, much is understood that is not written down, and much is confidently assumed that may subsequently be denied. Nor is venality, overt or veiled, the chief danger to be apprehended. What we must fear is not so much the campaign gift which buys the way to an ambassadorship or a cabinet seat, as the effect upon platforms and nominations of the anticipated need of securing funds from a few wealthy men.

The little corner of Europe, now known as the independent kingdom of Belgium, has played a rôle in history entirely out of proportion to its size and political importance. Belgium has been the cause of many wars, national and international, and on her soil the fate of Europe has often been decided. It well deserves Bonaparte's appelation “the battlefield of Europe.” Because of her geographic situation, right in the midst of a group of hostile powers and because of her great economic importance, this tiny land has been the choice morsel which many nations strove to possess. Burgundy, Spain, France, Austria and Holland, each in turn, ruled the country. The prize was so great that, rather than see it in the hands of any one power, the nations of Europe agreed that none of them should possess it. In this way was born the kingdom of Belgium during the early part of the nineteenth century; a German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, was made king of the newlyborn nation, and its existence was safeguarded by a guarantee of neutrality.

Any open-minded inquirer into the relations between the press and public opinion in this country will be met at the threshold by a series of paradoxes. The evidence offered him is sharply conflicting, even radically contradictory. Newspapers are all-powerful. They are also completely impotent. The press is at once dreaded and despised, dismissed as negligible at the same time that it is fawned upon. Men in public life will at one moment make every effort to get, in the French phrase, a “bonne presse,” for themselves and their measures but at the next will rail at newspaper opposition as a thing at which they may snap their fingers. Their opinion of the futility of the press, it may be noted, is usually intensified, if not originally provoked, by their ceasing to stand high in its good graces.

A man reading a political editorial is usually in the minds of men who set out to discuss the relation between “The Press and Public Opinion.” “Does it convince him,” they ask. The issue is broader, as broad as the consciousness of society. Without a common consciousness in regard to the fact and event of the day, shared by individuals, but known together and at once, public opinion, in the modern sense, could not exist. The opinion and action of modern society in all its various forms and channels rests on the possession by the individuals who make up society of a common body of knowledge and fact supplied day by day in the newspaper. If the individuals who make up the social organism did not have this common daily knowledge of a common body of fact which each knows is in common, they could not feel, think or act together any more than the individual can have conscious feeling, thought and action without the light of consciousness to enable him to act. This common consciousness of society the newspaper creates. The street and market-place do something, the public meeting does more, the book, weekly and monthly, go a step farther to bring people to think the same things about the republic, and on all the issues of society, but the daily newspaper does more than all the rest put together. The reason why the news in a newspaper counts is not because news is recorded there. All news, social, political, criminal, has other records. Newspaper news is news and not daily annals, because it is read by great masses. Every reader knows that all other readers are in the same light of facts, chronicled with more or less accuracy it may be, but still read by all and known by all. In the light of this common consciousness, common opinion develops and the relation of the opinion-making part of a newspaper, the editorial, to the making of opinion rests on the fact that it enters on the field of common public consciousness at the very moment that event and issue are calling for opinions, decision and action. The editorial is perpetually weighed and estimated as if it were something said by one man to another man or the page of a book read by successive readers, when its real weight lies in the vast mass who for an instant read it when the news is before them and they are aware that their attention is the conscious attention of all the readers of which they are a part.