like disproportion between the vastness of results and the minuteness of
verbal distinction is exhibited in this decision by the House. The change
of "report" into "prepare" threw up a ridge in the field of constitutional
development that has affected the trend of American politics ever since.
This is the explanation of a problem of comparative politics that has
often excited much wondering notice: why it is that alone among modern
representative assemblies the American House of Representatives tends to
decline in prestige and authority. The original expectation was that the
House of Representatives would take a dominant position like that of the
House of Commons, but its degradation began so soon that Fisher Ames noted
it as early as 1797. Writing to Hamilton he observed:

"The heads of departments are chief clerks. Instead of being the ministry,
the organs of the executive power, and imparting a kind of momentum to the
operation of the laws, they are precluded even from communicating with the
House by reports.... Committees already are the Ministers and while the
House indulges a jealousy of encroachment in its functions, which are
properly deliberative, it does not perceive that these are impaired and
nullified by the monopoly as well as the perversion of information by
these committees."

Justice Story, who entered Congress in 1808 as a Jeffersonian Republican,
noted the process of degradation, and in his _Commentaries_ he pointed out
the cause: "The Executive is compelled to resort to secret and unseen
influences, to private interviews and private arrangements to accomplish
its own appropriate purposes, instead of proposing and sustaining its own
duties and measures by a bold and manly appeal to the nation in the face
of its representatives."

The last of the organic acts of the session was the one establishing the