THE MACHINERY OF ELECTIVE GOVERNMENT. 639 



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 im- 

 agined to be the real ruler, though he had already become a figure- 

 head, 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 sti'ong 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 con- 

 trolling 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 mag- 

 nitude 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 par- 

 tisans 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 per- 

 suaded 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, 



