placing certain rights of the citizen under the protection of the written Constitution.

These men, practical politicians who knew how infinitely difficult a business government is, desired no bold experiments. They preferred, so far as circumstances permitted, to walk in the old paths, to follow methods which experience had tested. Accordingly they started from the system on which their own colonial governments, and afterward their State governments, had been conducted. They created an executive magistrate, the President, on the model of the State governor, and of the British Crown. They created a legislature of two Houses, Congress, on the model of the two Houses of their State legislatures, and of the British Parliament. And following the precedent of the British judges, irremovable except by the Crown and Parliament combined, they created a judiciary appointed for life, and irremovable save by impeachment. In these great matters, however, as well as in many lesser matters, they copied not so much the Constitution of England as the Constitutions of their several States, in which, as was natural, many features of the English Constitution had been embodied. It has been truly said that nearly every provision of the Federal Constitution that has worked well is one borrowed from or suggested by some State constitution.

The British Parliament had always been, was then, and remains now, a sovereign and constituent assembly. I can make and unmake any and every law, change the form of government or the succession to the Crown, interfere with the course of justice, extinguish the most sacred private rights of the citizen. Both practically and legally, it is to-day the only and the sufficient depository of the authority of the nation; and is therefore, within the sphere of law, irresponsible and omnipotent. In the American

system there exists no such body. Not merely Congress alone, but also Congress and the President conjoined, are subject to the Constitution, and cannot move a step outside the circle which the Constitution has drawn around them. If they do, they transgress the law and exceed their powers. Such acts as they may do in excess of their powers are void, and may be, indeed ought to be, treated as void by the meanest citizen. The only power which is ultimately sovereign, as the British Parliament is always and directly sovereign, is the people of the States, acting in the manner prescribed by the Constitution, and capable in that manner of passing any law whatever in the form of a constitutional amendment.

The subjection of all the ordinary authorities and organs of government to a supreme instrument expressing the will of the sovereign people, and capable of being altered by them only, has been usually deemed the most remarkable novelty of the American system. But it is merely an application to the wider sphere of the nation, of a plan approved by the experience of the several States. And the plan had, in these States, been the outcome rather of a slow course of historical development than of conscious determination taken at any one point of their progress from pretty settlements to powerful commonwealths.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PRESIDENT

Every one who undertakes to describe the American system of government is obliged to follow the American division of it into the three departmentsExecutive, Legislative, Judicial.

The President is the creation of the Constitution of 1789. Under the Confederation there was only a

presiding officer of Congress, but no head of the nation.

Why was it thought necessary to have a President at all? The fear of monarchy, of a strong government, of a centralized government, prevailed widely in 1787. The convention found it extremely hard to devise a satisfactory method of choosing the President. Yet it was settled very early in the debates of 1787 that the central executive authority must be vested in one person; and the opponents of the draft Constitution, while quarreling with his powers, did not accuse his existence.

The explanation is to be found not so much in the wish to reproduce the British Constitution as in the familiarity of the Americans, as citizens of the several States, with the office of State governor (in some States then called President) and in their disgust with the feebleness which Congress had shown. Opinion called for a man, because an assembly had been found to lack promptitude and vigor. And it may be conjectured that the alarms felt as to the danger from one man's predominance were largely allayed by the presence of George Washington. Even while the debates were proceeding, every one must have thought of him as the proper person to preside over the Union as he was then presiding over the convention. The creation of the office would seem justified by the existence of a person exactly fitted to fill it. Hamilton proposed that the head of the State should be appointed for good behavior, i.e., for life, subject to removal by impeachment. The proposal was defeated, though it received the support of persons so democratically-minded as Madison and Edmund Randolph; but nearly all sensible men admitted that the risk of foreign wars required the concentration of executive powers into a single hand. And the fact that in every one of their commonwealths

there existed an officer in whom the State Constitution vested executive authority, balancing him against the State legislature, made the establishment of a Federal chief magistrate seem the obvious course.

The statesmen of the Convention made an enlarged copy of the State governor, or a reduced and improved copy of the English king, shorn of a part of his prerogative by the intervention of the Senate in treaties and appointments, of another part by the restriction of his action to Federal affairs, while his dignity as well as his influence are diminished by his holding office for four years instead of for life. Subject to these and other precautions, he was meant by the Constitution-framers to resemble the State governor and the British king, not only in being the head of the executive, but in standing apart from and above political parties. He was to represent the nation as a whole, as the governor represented the State commonwealth, and to think only of the welfare of the people.

This idea appears in the method provided for the election of a President. To have left the choice of the chief magistrate to a direct popular vote over the whole country would have raised a dangerous excitement, and would have given too much encouragement to candidates of merely popular gifts. To have entrusted it to Congress would have not only subjected the executive to the legislature in violation of the principle which requires these departments to be kept distinct, but have tended to make him the creature of one particular faction instead of the choice of the nation. Hence the device of a double election was adopted. The Constitution directs each State to choose a number of presidential electors equal to the number of its representatives in both Houses of Congress. Some weeks later, these electors meet in each State on a day fixed by law, and give their votes in

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presiding officer of Congress, but no head of the nation.

Why was it thought necessary to have a President at all? The fear of monarchy, of a strong government, of a centralized government, prevailed widely in 1787. The convention found it extremely hard to devise a satisfactory method of choosing the President. Yet it was settled very early in the debates of 1787 that the central executive authority must be vested in one person; and the opponents of the draft Constitution, while quarreling with his powers, did not accuse his existence.

The explanation is to be found not so much in the wish to reproduce the British Constitution as in the familiarity of the Americans, as citizens of the several States, with the office of State governor (in some States then called President) and in their disgust with the feebleness which Congress had shown. Opinion called for a man, because an assembly had been found to lack promptitude and vigor. And it may be conjectured that the alarms felt as to the danger from one man's predominance were largely allayed by the presence of George Washington. Even while the debates were proceeding, every one must have thought of him as the proper person to preside over the Union as he was then presiding over the convention. The creation of the office would seem justified by the existence of a person exactly fitted to fill it. Hamilton proposed that the head of the State should be appointed for good behavior, i.e., for life, subject to removal by impeachment. The proposal was defeated, though it received the support of persons so democratically-minded as Madison and Edmund Randolph; but nearly all sensible men admitted that the risk of foreign wars required the concentration of executive powers into a single hand. And the fact that in every one of their commonwealths