fixed by statute. The President makes appointments, but the Senate has the right of rejecting them, and Congress may pass acts specifying the qualifications of appointees, and reducing the salary of any official except the President himself and the judges. The real strength of the Executive therefore, the rampart from behind which it can resist the aggressions of the legislature, is in ordinary times the veto power. In other words, it survives, as an executive, in virtue not of any properly executive function, but of the share in legislative functions which it has received; it holds its ground by force, not of its separation from the legislature, but of its participation in a right properly belonging to the legislature.

An authority which depends on a veto capable of being overruled by a two-thirds majority may seem frail. But the Executive has some independence. He is strong for defense, if not for attack. Congress can, except within that narrow sphere which the Constitution has absolutely reserved to him, baffle the President, can interrogate, check, and worry his ministers. But it can neither drive him the way it wishes him to go, nor dismiss them for disobedience or incompetence.

An individual man has some great advantages in combating an assembly. His counsels are less distracted. His secrets are better kept. He may sow discord among his antagonists. He can strike a more sudden blow. But in a struggle extending over a long course of years an assembly has advantages over a succession of officers, especially of elected officers. Men come and go, but an assembly goes on forever; it is immortal, because while the members change, the policy, the passion for extending its authority, the tenacity in clinging to what has once been gained, remain persistent. A weak magistrate

comes after a strong magistrate, and yields what his predecessor had fought for; but an assembly holds all it has ever won. Thus Congress has succeeded in occupying nearly all the ground which the Constitution left debatable between the President and itself; and would, did it possess a better internal organization, be even more plainly than it now is the supreme power in the government.

THE STATE GOVERNMENTS

THE

AMERCIAN SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT

The State Governments

CHAPTER I.

NATURE OF THE STATE

The American State is a peculiar organism, unlike anything in modern Europe, or in the ancient world. The only parallel is to be found in the cantons of the Switzerland of our own day.

There are forty-five States in the American Union, varying in size from Texas, with an area of 265,780 square miles, to Rhode Island, with an area of 1,250 square miles. The largest State is much larger than either France or the Germanic Empire, while the smallest is smaller than Warwickshire or Corsica.

The older colonies had different historical origins. Virginia and North Carolina were unlike Massachusetts and Connecticut; New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland different from both; while in recent times the stream of European immigration has filled some States with Irishmen, others with Germans, others with Scandinavians, and has left most of the Southern States wholly untouched.

Nevertheless, the form of government is in its main outlines, and to a large extent even in its actual working, the same in all these forty-five republics, and the differences, instructive as they are, relate to points of secondary consequence.