Page:Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction.djvu/73

 employed as a warrant for Congressional action. Both legislature and executive were on this theory "above law." Hence while Congress was endowed with authority to legislate entirely at its discretion, the President was privileged at his discretion to disregard all this legislation. Where such a conclusion was possible, the principle of departmental check and balance was obviously of little significance. Good statesmanship in both executive and legislature preserved the harmony of the two branches till the strain of armed hostilities was relaxed, but no longer. In the work of destruction the President was the real government, and Congress kept in the background; in the work of reconstruction Congress asserted once more its controlling power, and violently put the President into the background.

In the practice of the war-time the only principle working efficiently in limitation of the government was that of frequent elections. Public opinion, in short, and not the elaborate devices of the constitution, played the decisive role in the United States just as it had played it in earlier centuries and presumably less favored lands. American chauvinists had boasted long and loudly of the superior stability of the written constitution; a great national crisis quickly revealed that it was no more secure against the forces of popular passion than the less artificial structures with which it had been so favorably compared.