PROBLEMS OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 589 



measures into the legislature, their defeat or rejection does not call 

 for the resignation of the directory or of that member of it par- 

 ticularly responsible for the project. He or they must simply sub- 

 mit to the will of the existing legislature in every case and go on under 

 its instructions. 



The presidential system goes naturally with the elected executive, 

 the parliamentary with the hereditary executive, while the direc- 

 torial system belongs scientifically nowhere. The directory is 

 scientifically and historically discredited as an executive system. 

 It exists in only one of the seventeen states which I have brought 

 under this study, viz., Switzerland, and seems to be on the way of 

 establishment in one other, viz., Norway, where the successful insist- 

 ence of the Norwegians that the King's Ministers shall sit in the 

 legislature and shall resign when out of harmony with the legisla- 

 tive majority, without according the King the power of dissolving 

 the legislature and appealing to the voters to settle the question in 

 the new parliamentary election, is certainly tending to make the 

 ministry a directorial board, completely subject to the legislature. 

 Switzerland, being an internationally neutralized state, may make 

 experiments with a weak executive. For Norway such a situation 

 is more dangerous. In both cases it seems to me an unsatisfactory 

 solution of the executive problem and to call for revision. 



Of the other fifteen states, all that have hereditary executives, 

 except the German Empire, Austria, and Hungary, have developed 

 into or are developing into the parliamentary system substantially. 

 They are, at least, all moving in the direction of the English model, 

 and are destined to arrive, sooner or later, at something like the 

 English result. All along the road, however, from their present 

 stage of development of the system to its ultimate form, their pro- 

 blems are strewn, and their best course is to look to English experi- 

 ence and follow as nearly as somewhat different conditions will 

 permit in English footsteps. It is most important to kings and 

 emperors themselves that they should recognize the fact that the 

 parliamentary system of relations between the executive and the 

 legislature is a necessary contrivance for reconciling modern political 

 thought and modern political conditions with the hereditary tenure 

 of the executive. If they resist too far its establishment and de- 

 velopment, they will simply provoke a republican revolution which 

 will sweep them entirely away. The royal imperial houses of Haps- 

 burg and Hohenzollern, old and powerful and popular as they are, 

 cannot in the long run resist this movement. It is the greatest con- 

 stitutional problem, from the point of view of their own interests, 

 with which they have to deal, and it behooves them to devote them- 

 selves to its thorough comprehension and its rational and natural 

 solution. 



