tion of it. We had numerous and monstrous difficulties to combat. Surely, we ought not to increase them. When the people behold in the Senate the countenance of an aristocracy, and in the President the form at least of a little monarch, will not their alarms be sufficiently raised, without taking from their immediate representatives a right which has been so long appropriated to them? The executive will have more influence over the Senate than over the House of Representatives. Allow the Senate to originate in this case, and that influence will be sure to mix itself in their deliberations and plans. The declaration of war, he conceived, ought not to be in the Senate composed of twenty-six men only, but rather in the other House. In the other House ought to be placed the origination of the means of war. As to commercial regulations which may involve revenue, the difficulty may be avoided by restraining the definition to bills for the mere or sole purpose of raising revenue. The Senate will be more likely to be corrupt than the House of Representatives, and should, therefore, have less to do with money matters. His principal object, however, was to prevent popular objections against the plan, and to secure its adoption.
Mr. RUTLEDGE. The friends of this motion are not consistent in their reasoning. They tell us that we ought to be guided by the long experience of Great Britain, and not our own experience of eleven years; and yet they themselves propose to depart from it. The House of Commons not only have the exclusive right of originating, but the Lords are not allowed to alter or amend a money bill. Will not the people say that this restriction is but a mere tub to the whale? They cannot but see that it is of no real consequence, and will be more likely to be displeased with it, as an attempt to bubble them, than to impute it to a watchfulness over their rights. For his part, he would prefer giving the exclusive right to the Senate, if it was to be given exclusively at all. The Senate, being more conversant in business, and having more leisure, will digest the bills much better, and as they are to have no effect till examined and approved by the House of Representatives, there can be no possible danger. These clauses in the constitutions of the states had been put in through a blind adherence to the British model. If the work was to be done over now, they would be omitted. The experiment in South Carolina, where the Senate cannot originate or amend money bills, has shown that it answers no good purpose, and produces the very bad one of continually dividing and heating the two Houses. Sometimes, indeed, if the matter of the amendment of the Senate is pleasing to the other House, they wink at the encroachment; if it be displeasing, then the Constitution is appealed to. Every session is distracted by altercations on this subject. The practice, now becoming frequent, is for the Senate not to make formal amendments, but to send down a schedule of the alterations which will procure the bill their assent.
