Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/659

Rh without personal power or a prominent place in the minds of the people. The belief in the necessity of an individual chief seems to be a tradition of monarchy. In framing their institutions the founders of the American Republic, though they substituted election for inheritance, and introduced the federal element, were guided by the principles which Montesquieu and other political philosophers of the time supposed themselves to have educed from the practice of the British Constitution. In the place of the king, whom they imagined to be the real ruler, though he had already become a figurehead, they put an elective chief magistrate, and they jealously guarded what they had been taught to regard as the palladium of liberty, the separation of the executive from the legislative, though, had their eyes been strong enough to look through the haze of constitutional fiction, they would have seen that the Legislature in England was all the time appointing and removing the executive, and appointing and controlling the judiciary to boot. The elective presidency is an almost unmixed evil, and an evil of the most formidable kind, especially since the multiplication of patronage has enormously augmented the magnitude of the prize and the number of the place-hunters whose fortunes are staked on the election. It involves the commonwealth perpetually in troubles like those of a disputed succession. It fills the country with the turmoil of a contest which now extends over at least two years of every four, and disturbs commercial and industrial as well as public life. It keeps party passions always at fever-heat. It breeds ever-increasing swarms of wire-pullers, intriguers, office-seekers, and political vermin of all kinds. It brings every dangerous question to a head; it did this in the case of the slavery question, which, in the absence of the artificial crisis produced by a presidential election, might possibly have dragged on and found a gradual and peaceful solution. A dispute as to the result of the election is always possible; it occurred between Hayes and Tilden, and then, too, infuriated partisans began to lay their hands on the hilts of their swords, though the good sense of the nation at last prevailed. Finally, the position of an elective President with personal power, but holding office only for a term, is a standing incentive to encroachment. The ambition of an ex-President, excited in this way, is now riding the country like a nightmare; and nobody can doubt that the aim of the men about him is to place him in the office for life, an object which, if they succeed in again re-electing him, they will not be unlikely to attain. That the people of the United States will ever with eyes open revert to the hereditary principle can not be believed by any one who has not persuaded himself that hereditary government is an everlasting ordinance, to which all who have strayed from it are sure to come back in time. But a lapse into a dictatorship, and from a dictatorship into something like a dynasty, would not be utterly impossible, if the foreign element, untrained to self-government, should become proportionally too large,