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UNITED STATES.

(United States of America.)

Constitution and Government.

The form of government of the United States is based on the constitution of September 17, 1787, to which ten amendments were added, December 15, 1791; an eleventh amendment, January 8, 1798; a twelfth amendment, September 25, 1804; a thirteenth amendment, December 18, 1865; a fourteenth amendment, July 28, 1868; and a fifteenth amendment, March 30, 1870.

By the constitution, the government of the nation is entrusted to three separate authorities, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The executive power is vested in a president. It is enacted by section 1, article II. of the constitution, that the president 'shall hold his office during the term of four years,' and be elected, together with a vice-president, chosen for the same term, in the mode here prescribed. 'Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no senator or representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.' The same section of the constitution enacts that 'the Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes, which day shall be the same throughout the United States; and further that 'no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall be eligible to the office of president; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.'

The president is commander-in-chief of the army and navy, and of the militia in the service of the Union. He has the power of a veto on all laws passed by Congress; but notwithstanding his veto, any bill may become a law on its afterwards being passed by two-thirds of both Houses of Congress. The vice-president is ex-officio president of the Senate; and in case of the death or resignation of the president, he becomes the president for the remainder of the term, and his place is filled by the vice-president, or the temporary president of the Senate. The elections for president and vice-