WRIGHT— CONTROL OF FOREIGN RELATIONS. 451 



veloped constitutional manners which will make them work like a 

 well-ordered dinner party. The crudity of Jefferson's pell mell 

 banquet and Jackson's Peggy O'Neil cotillion persists in the rela- 

 tions of the departments of government. 



Our conventions will not be those of England. In the conduct 

 of domestic afi'airs, our system of legally enforceable limitations 

 upon power rather than the English system of unlimited power, 

 subject to immediate political responsibility for its exercise, is likely 

 to persist. We will continue to rely upon legal responsibility, rather 

 than political responsibility as in England, or administrative respon- 

 sibility as on the continent of Europe. In short, the object of the 

 conventions and understandings which we will develop will be the 

 ultimate triumph of the people acting through the constitution- 

 amending process, not as in England, the people acting through an 

 election to the House of Commons. 



In the conduct of foreign affairs, however, there will probably 

 be a closer approximation in the two countries. At present parlia- 

 mentary control does not exist in the British foreign office^® any 

 more than constitutional limitations check the President's control 

 of foreign relations.^*' In foreign affairs neither a daily question- 

 ing under threat of ousting from office, nor a judicially interpreted 

 confinement to constitutional powers has proved feasible. Until 

 international organization is much further developed, great discre- 

 tion must be vested in a single head. Acts involving assumptions 

 of national responsibility must be final. Under present conditions 

 we must frankly recognize executive leadership in foreign affairs. 

 But we must attempt to develop conventions so that the President's 

 wide discretion will only be exercised after the most careful con- 

 sideration possible, and in a way which will make the employment 

 of a senatorial or congressional veto an extreme rarity, and an im- 



2» See remarks of A. J. Balfour and Premier Asquith to Select Committee 

 of the House of Commons on Procedure, 1914 (Report 378), printed in 

 Ponsonby, op. cit., Appdx. i, p. 121 et seq. See also ibid., p. 45 et seq., 

 Heatley, op. cit., pp. 68-70, 265, and supra, note 18. 



30 See H. J. Ford, " The War and the Constitution," and " The Growth 

 of Dictatorship," Atlantic Monthly, Oct., 1917, and May, 1918, and supra, 

 sec. 68. 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC, VOL. LX., DD, MARCH I5, I922. 



