Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/814

784 and counterpoise of its three coordinate branches, the founders of our Government designed that each two should check the third, because each has a natural impulse to extend its prerogatives. Within twelve years each of the three has essayed to over-step its lawful bounds, and to exercise power not lawfully invested in it. But patriotism, deliberation and forbearance, have ordinarily been sufficient to avert ill consequences from this interplay of governmental authority.

When, however, by reason of personal grievance or partisan feeling, the contest between the branches of the Government becomes one à l'outrance, a new peril arises, namely, peril of a permanent subjection of one to another. Such is the tendency of this new doctrine of the investiture of sovereignty, since it would push the immediate victory of Congress to a permanent humiliation of the Executive office, on the road to the acquisition of supreme power. Even where no violent political transformation results—as assuredly none has come upon us now—still, every such bitter strife between the component parts of a government which is bound to present itself to the world and to the nation as a unit, leads to some encroachment of the conquering branch upon the conquered. Thus the tendency is to destroy the theoretic equilibrium. No longer side by side, one branch, be it executive, judicial, or legislative, tends to work ahead, by successive gradations, till the others are brought into its wake, as tenders or subalterns. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Whether such tendencies are desirable or undesirable is a matter of opinion. The fact of their existence is all I discuss. The present tendency seems to be toward turning Congress into a Parliament, and the President into a sort of Prime Minister. Yet this is only a tendency; and that it will ever be consummated is nearly as improbable, upon the whole, as that the sovereign power of the country will ever be conveyed from its present seat in the organic people to Congress, Congress becoming the state. It is, perhaps, more likely that the Republic, which now seems to be drifting from its ancient moorings, will be perceived anon to swing slowly back over its present course, thus proving that it is still fast, though swept hither and thither by the tidal ebb and flow of the passions of the hour.

the dinner lately given in honor of Charles Dickens, in New York, the guest sustained a converging fire of personal compliments, which it was, of course, impossible for him to return against a host so hydra-like. With wisdom and good taste, he paid his compliments to the country, saying that "it was enough in England to be an American to be received with the readiest respect and recognition anywhere," and that England has "a great liking" for America, and "does not regard an American as a foreigner," but considers "the two peoples essentially one."

At a carna viatica, kind words to the land he fares from always befit the parting traveller; but these of Mr. Dickens were probably not mere courtesies. The London press has been saying nearly the same thing for a twelvemonth. Farragut was made welcome in England, according to the London "News," "for his own sake and the sake of his country," it being wise to show "those international courtesies which have so material an influence on the policy of nations," because "injustice" was done to America "by a large portion of our press and a small but influential portion of our people, during their civil war." I acknowledge that these words fell from an old friend; but even "The Times" has philo-American editorials now, which are not wholly due to the circumstance that Mr. Jennings now writes in London under the "we" instead of in New York under the "I." It discarded the theory of perpetual allegiance, even while Mr. Banks was poising that dreadful Congressional mace of his, which, when at last brought to bear, struck not a rock, but a mouldy crust Mr. Banks (who is always for mortifying the British lion by means of small-beer eloquence, and forcing him to sneak off with his tail between his legs at sight of the bird of our destiny), told, Congress—

Sir, the English administration which should do that which we claim to be right, would be overturned