of this
which could be conceived. The Upper House of our Victorian
Constitution, representing the rich wool-growers, has disagreed with
the Lower Assembly, and most business is suspended. But for a most
curious stratagem, the machine of Government would stand still. Most
Constitutions have committed this blunder. The two most remarkable
Republican institutions in the world commit it. In both the American
and the Swiss Constitutions the Upper House has as much authority as
the second: it could produce the maximum of impediment--the dead-lock,
if it liked; if it does not do so, it is owing not to the goodness of
the legal constitution, but to the discreetness of the members of the
Chamber. In both these Constitutions, this dangerous division is
defended by a peculiar doctrine with which I have nothing to do now. It
is said that there must be in a Federal Government some institution,
some authority, some body possessing a veto in which the separate
States composing the Confederation are all equal. I confess this
doctrine has to me no self-evidence, and it is assumed, but not proved.
The State of Delaware is NOT equal in power or influence to the State
of New York, and you cannot make it so by giving it an equal veto in an
Upper Chamber. The history of such an institution is indeed most
natural. A little State will like, and must like, to see some token,
some memorial mark of its old independence preserved in the
Constitution by which that independence is extinguished. But it is one
thing for an institution to be natural, and another for it to be
expedient. If indeed it be that a Federal Government compels the
erection of an Upper Chamber of conclusive and co-ordinate authority,
it is one more in addition to the many other inherent defects of that
kind of Government. It may be necessary to have the blemish, but it is
a blemish just as much.

There ought to be in every Constitution an available authority
somewhere. The sovereign power must be come-at-able. And the English
have made it so. The House of Lords, at the passing of the Reform Act
of 1832, was as unwilling to concur with the House of Commons as the
Upper Chamber at Victoria to concur with the Lower Chamber. But it did
concur. The Crown has the authority to create new peers; and the king
of the day had promised the Ministry of the day to create them. The
House of Lords did not like the precedent, and they passed the bill.
The power was not used, but its existence w