been alienated by the faults of his administration, rested not merely on reverence for the example set by Washington, but also on the fear that a President repeatedly chosen would become dangerous to republican institutions. This particular alarm seems to a European groundless. I do not deny that a really great man might exert ampler authority from the presidential chair than its recent occupants have done. The same observation applies to the Popedom and even to the English throne. The President has a position of immense dignity, an unrivalled platform from which to impress his ideas (if he has any) upon the people. But it is hard to imagine a President overthrowing the existing Constitution. He has no standing army, and he cannot create one. Congress can checkmate him by stopping supplies. There is no aristocracy to rally round him. Every State furnishes an independent centre of resistance. If he were to attempt a coup d'état, it could only be by appealing to the people against Congress, and Congress could hardly, considering that it is re-elected every two years, attempt to oppose the people. One must suppose a condition bordering on civil war, and the President putting the resources of the executive at the service of one of the intending belligerents, already strong and organized, in order to conceive a case in which he will be formidable to freedom. If there be any danger, it would seem to lie in another direction. The larger a community becomes the less does it seem to respect an assembly, the more is it attracted by an individual man. A bold President who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country, might be tempted to override the law, and deprive the minority of the protection which the law affords it. He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses. But nothing in the present state of American politics gives weight to such apprehensions.

1 Assuming his conduct to be such as to warrant this extreme step, to which Congress is loth to resort, for the reasons stated in Chapter XX. post. Contests between Congress and the President have tended to take the form of attaching riders to appropriation bills.

CHAPTER VII

OBSERVATIONS ON THE PRESIDENCY

ALTHOUGH the President has been, not that independent good citizen whom the framers of the Constitution contemplated, but, at least during the last sixty years, a party man, seldom much above the average in character or abilities, the office has attained the main objects for which it was created. Such mistakes as have been made in foreign policy, or in the conduct of the administrative departments, have been rarely owing to the constitution of the office or to the errors of its holder. This is more than one who should review the history of Europe during the last hundred years could say of any European monarchy. Nevertheless, the faults chargeable on hereditary kingship, faults more serious than Englishmen, who have watched with admiration the wisdom of the Crown during the present reign, can easily realize, must not make us overlook certain defects incidental to the American presidency, perhaps to any plan of vesting the headship of the State in a person elected for a limited period.

In a country where there is no hereditary throne nor hereditary aristocracy, an office raised far above all other offices offers too great a stimulus to ambition. This glittering prize, always dangling before the eyes of prominent statesmen, has a power stronger than any dignity under a European crown to lure them (as it lured Clay and Webster) from the path of straightforward consistency. One who aims at the presidency-and all prominent politicians do aim at it has the strongest possible motives to avoid making enemies. Now a great statesman ought to be prepared to make enemies. It is one thing to try to be popular-an unpopular man will be uninfluential-it is another to seek popularity by pleasing every section of your party. This is the temptation of presidential aspirants.

A second defect is that the presidential election, occurring once

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in four years, throws the country for several months into a state of turmoil, for which there may be no occasion. Perhaps there are no serious party issues to be decided, perhaps the best thing would be that the existing Administration should pursue the even tenor of its way. The Constitution, however, requires an election to be held, so the whole costly and complicated machinery of agitation is put in motion; and if issues do not exist, they have to be created.1 Professional politicians who have a personal interest in the result, because it involves the gain or loss of office to themselves, conduct what is called a "campaign," and the country is forced into a factitious excitement from midsummer, when each party selects the candidate whom it will nominate, to the first week of November, when the contest is decided. There is some political education in the process, but it is bought dearly, not to add that business, and especially finance, is disturbed, and much money spent unproductively.

Again, these regularly recurring elections produce a discontinuity of policy. Even when the new President belongs to the same party as his predecessor, he usually nominates a new cabinet, having to reward his especial supporters. Many of the inferior offices are changed; men who have learned their work make way for others who have everything to learn. If the new President belongs to the opposite party, the change of officials is far more sweeping, and involves larger changes of policy. The evil would be more serious were it not that in foreign policy, where the need for continuity is greatest, the United States have little to do, and that the co-operation of the Senate in this department prevents the divergence of the ideas of one President from those of another from being so wide as it might otherwise be.

Fourthly. The fact that he is re-eligible once, but (practically) only once, operates unfavourably on the President. He is tempted to play his cards for a re-nomination by so pandering to active sections of his own party, or so using his patronage to conciliate influential politicians, as to make them put him forward at the next election. On the other hand, if he is in his second

1 In England, also, there is necessarily a campaign once at least in every six or seven years, when a general election takes place, and sometimes oftener. But note that in England (1) this is the only season of disturbance, whereas in America the Congressional elections furnish a second; (2) the period is usually shorter (three to six weeks, not four months); (3) there have usually been real and momentous issues, dividing the great parties, which the nation had to settle.

term of office, he has no longer much motive to regard the interests of the nation at large, because he sees that his own political death is near. It may be answered that these two evils will correct one another, that the President will in his first term be anxious to win the respect of the nation, in his second he will have no motive for yielding to the unworthy pressure of party wire-pullers.

But the fact is, as has been pointed out by some foreign observers, that if he were held ineligible for the next term, but eligible for any future term, both sets of evils might be avoided, and both sets of benefits secured. The argument against such a provision would be that it makes that breach in policy which may now happen only once in eight years, necessarily happen once in four years. It would, for instance, have prevented the re-election of Abraham Lincoln in 1864.1 The founders of the Southern Confederacy of 1861-65 were so much impressed by the objections to the present system that they provided that their President should hold office for six years, but not be re-eligible.

Fifthly. An outgoing President is a weak President. During the four months of his stay in office after his successor has been chosen, he declines, except in cases of extreme necessity, to take any new departure, to embark on any executive policy which cannot be completed before he quits office. This is, of course, even more decidedly the case if his successor belongs to the opposite party.2

Lastly. The result of an election may be doubtful, not from equality of votes, for this is provided against, but from a dispute as to the validity of votes given in or reported from the States. This difficulty arose in 1876, between Mr. Hayes and Mr. Tilden,

1 A more obvious and practically sufficient answer is that it would need the passing of an amendment to the Constitution, and it needs a very strong case to induce three-fourths of the States to agree to change this time-honoured document.

2 Mr. E. A. Freeman (History of Federal Government, i. 302) adduces from Polybius (iv. 6, 7) a curious instance showing that the same mischief arose in the Achaian League: "The Etolians chose for an inroad the time when the official year (of the Achaian General) was drawing to its close, as a time when the Achaian counsels were sure to be weak. Aratos, the General elect, was not yet in office; Timoxenos, the outgoing General, shrank from energetic action so late in his year, and at last yielded up his office to Aratos before the legal time." This effort of Timoxenos to escape from the consequences of the system could not have occurred in governments like those of Rome, England, or the United States, where "the reign of law is far stricter than it was in the Greek republics.

forcible because the previous career of the possible candidates has generally made it easier to say who will succeed as a candidate than who will succeed as a President; and because the wire-pullers with whom the choice rests are better judges of the former question than of the latter.

After all, too, and this is a point much less obvious to Europeans than to Americans, a President need not be a man of brilliant intellectual gifts. Englishmen, imagining him as something like their prime minister, assume that he ought to be a dazzling orator, able to sway legislatures or multitudes, possessed also of the constructive powers that can devise a great policy or frame a comprehensive piece of legislation. They forget that the President does not sit in Congress, that he ought not to address meetings, except on ornamental and (usually) nonpolitical occasions, that he cannot submit bills nor otherwise influence the action of the legislature. His main duties are to be prompt and firm in securing the due execution of the laws and maintaining the public peace, careful and upright in the choice of the executive officials of the country. Eloquence, whose value is apt to be overrated in all free countries, imagination, profundity of thought or extent of knowledge, are all in so far a gain to him that they make him a bigger man, and help him to gain a greater influence over the nation, an influence which, if he be a true patriot, he may use for its good. But they are not necessary for the due dis charge in ordinary times of the duties of his post. A man may lack them and yet make an excellent President. Four-fifths of his work is the same in kind as that which devolves on the chairman of a commercial company or the manager of a railway, the work of choosing good subordinates, seeing that they attend to their business, and taking a sound practical view of such administrative questions as require his decision. Firmness, common sense, and most of all, honesty, an honesty above all suspicion of personal interest, are the qualities which the country chiefly needs in its chief magistrate.

So far we have been considering personal merits. But in the selection of a candidate many considerations have to be regarded besides personal merits, whether they be the merits of a candidate, or of a possible President. The chief of these considerations is the amount of support which can be secured from different States or from different regions, or, as the Americans say, "sections," of the Union. State feeling and sectional feel