It should, however, be accounted a deduction from the Senate's usefulness that it is seldom sure of more than two thirds of itself for more than four years at a time. In order that its life may be perpetual, one third of its membership is renewed or changed every two years, each third taking its turn at change or renewal in regular succession; and this device has, of course, an appreciably weakening effect on the legislative sinews of the Senate. Because the Senate mixes the parties in the composition of its Committees just as the House does, and those Committees must, consequently, be subjected to modification whenever the biennial senatorial elections bring in new men, freshly promoted from the House or from gubernatorial chairs. Places must be found for them at once in the working organization which busies itself in the committee-rooms. Six years is not the term of the Senate, but only of each Senator. Reckoning from any year in which one third of the Senate is elected, the term of the majority,--the two thirds not affected by the election,--is an average of the four and the two years which it has to live. There is never a time at which two thirds of the Senate have more than four years of appointed service before them. And this constant liability to change must, of course, materially affect the policy of the body. The time assured it in which to carry out any enterprise of policy upon which it may embark is seldom more than two years, the term of the House. It may be checked no less effectually than the lower House by the biennial elections, albeit the changes brought about in its membership are effected, not directly by the people, but indirectly and more slowly by the mediate operation of public opinion through the legislatures of the States. In estimating the value of the Senate, therefore, as a branch of the national legislature, we should offset the committee organization, with its denial of leadership which disintegrates the Senate, and that liability to the biennial infusion of new elements which may at any time interrupt the policy and break the purpose of the Senate, against those habits of free and open debate which clear its mind, and to some extent the mind of the public, with regard to the nation's business, doing much towards making legislation definite and consistent, and against those great additions to its efficiency which spring from its observation of "slow and steady forms" of procedure, from the mediate election which gives it independence, and from its having a rational and august cause for existing.