590 CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 



With the exception of France, the states having elected execu- 

 tives follow the presidential system, Switzerland not being further 

 considered. This is natural and rational, and I consider that in 

 these the executive problem has been fairly solved to meet modern 

 conditions and requirements. It is quite true that in the United 

 States and Mexico the method of indirect election of the executive 

 is criticised, and that in the practice of the United States the law 

 for counting the electoral vote has, until recently, been quite faulty 

 and is not yet entirely perfect, and that some advantage might 

 conceivably be gained by allowing the presence of the cabinet officers 

 in the houses of Congress to explain proposed executive measures 

 or even to propose administrative measures, but these things are, 

 from the point of view of this paper, matters of detail, and cannot 

 be discussed within the limits of this essay. 



It is the French Republic which is confronted with the serious 

 problem in regard to the executive and its relations to the legisla- 

 ture. The French Republic is attempting to work the system of 

 parliamentary government with an elected executive. From the 

 points of view of historical experience and sound theory this appears 

 as an unnatural, and, in the long run, unworkable combination. 

 The real parliamentary system requires, as I have already remarked, 

 not the complete subordination of the executive to the legislature, 

 but harmony of action between the two, and a power in the executive 

 either to dismiss his ministers or dissolve the legislature in order to 

 restore harmony upon important issues when it has been lost. No 

 democratic people will intrust the executive with such power over 

 the legislature, and if they would, the executive would not dare to use 

 it. It requires all the historic power, prestige, and mystical influ- 

 ences of the hereditary executive, the so-called sovereign, to exercise 

 such a power. The French have attempted to help themselves over 

 this difficulty by vesting the power to dissolve the Chamber of Depu- 

 ties in the President with the consent of the Senate, the Senate itself 

 not being made subject to executive dissolution. This may give 

 the President a certain backing which may enable him to act occa- 

 sionally. It did so in one or two early cases. But this is no fulfill- 

 ment of the requirements of the system. The executive alone must 

 have the power of dissolution over the entire legislature, at least over 

 the entire elected part of the legislature, and it is not sufficient that 

 the executive shall have it over only one chamber of the legislature, 

 and then only when sustained by the other chamber. Conflicts 

 between the two chambers might be settled in this way, but not 

 conflicts between the executive and the entire legislature, and the 

 settlement of such conflicts is the prime purpose of the parliamentary 

 system. When the relation prescribed by the French constitution 

 was established, that instrument provided that the seventy-five 



