Now there is no need to question the value of
expressing local opinions and exchanging them. Congress has great
value as the market-place of a continental nation. In the coatrooms,
the hotel lobbies, the boarding houses of Capitol Hill, at the
tea-parties of the Congressional matrons, and from occasional entries
into the drawing rooms of cosmopolitan Washington, new vistas are
opened, and wider horizons. But even if the theory were applied, and
the districts always sent their wisest men, the sum or a combination
of local impressions is not a wide enough base for national policy,
and no base at all for the control of foreign policy. Since the real
effects of most laws are subtle and hidden, they cannot be understood
by filtering local experiences through local states of mind. They can
be known only by controlled reporting and objective analysis. And just
as the head of a large factory cannot know how efficient it is by
talking to the foreman, but must examine cost sheets and data that
only an accountant can dig out for him, so the lawmaker does not
arrive at a true picture of the state of the union by putting together
a mosaic of local pictures. He needs to know the local pictures, but
unless he possesses instruments for calibrating them, one picture is
as good as the next, and a great deal better.
The President does come to the assistance of Congress by delivering
messages on the state of the Union.
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