as Washington that they hoped the powers of this great office would be administered, when he should fill it no longer.

Their forecast has been but half fulfilled. The electoral colleges have sunk to the condition of so many patent voting machines. They are a survival of the unfittest. Human govern

ment, like natural government, is administered, in the long run, on the principle of natural selection; but we are more apt to change the substance than the form of political institutions. England has slipped into a republic without knowing it. They keep their Queen, indeed, and are proud of her reign of sixty years,― how proud, the pageants of this summer have well shown; but she is little more than an historical curiosity. Our Presidential electors were brought into being as the safest and surest way of declaring the will of the people. We have found a better way, in national conventions of great parties, and the popular verdict upon their work, at the polls; but, by the force of the vis inertiae, we still cling to the outworn form of the electoral college.

The tailors persist in sewing two buttons on the backs of our coats, because in the England of the Tudors, when all travelling was done on horseback, one had to button back the skirts of his riding coat, to keep them from flapping and fraying against the saddle-bags. The tailor is the despot of modern society, and he still insists on his two buttons, though we have forgotten their use; and so the electoral colleges seem destined to cling to the skirts of the Constitution, simply because nobody cares to take the trouble to have them cut out.

Their purpose was good, but it has become an impossible one. Only a great war can give us again a national hero, and even then the successful general can never be President unless he is formally adopted as the candidate of a great party.

The successors of Washington have been often weak men,— never, as yet, bad men; but it is hard to name more than three of them who can in any sense be termed the heroes of the nation. The great powers, however, are always there, if the great man is not; and every generation has made them powers greater still. Time has also brought a greater permanence to them.

Thrones are allowed to descend by hereditary succession, because it is believed that the son is most likely to follow the policy of the father, and to resemble him in character.

The election of our Vice-President is arranged with a similar

view; but for a hundred years the vacancy that might occur by the event of his death was left by Congress to be filled by officers chosen by one or the other House of Congress.

What might have been expected, finally happened. A VicePresident became President, and the legislative officer next in succession was of a different political party. It was a time of deep party feeling, and there was serious danger that the President might be pushed from his place to make room for a representative of widely different views, coming into power, perhaps, by his own vote as a member of a court of impeachment. Twenty years later, when passion had had time to cool, a wiser law was enacted, under which the President, in such a case, names, in effect, his own successor, and so secures the continuance of the same policy until the people have had another opportunity to declare their will.

Aristotle said that the principle or spirit of two governments, widely different in political form, might be the same.

The principle of despotism may exist in any government. It may dominate in a democracy. It does when the popular majority legislates at will on matters of individual liberty or property. Despotism was never more terrible than in the hands of the people in the French Revolution.

We need not be surprised, therefore, that beginning in 1787, by granting our President more extensive powers than the chief magistrate in any democratic confederation had ever received before in times of peace, * we have finally drifted into a kind of modified constitutional despotism. It was the logical outcome of our attempt to unite in one government the form of a confederation and the principle of a nation. If sovereign States were to be kept within the limits which the Constitution set, it must be by something in the nature of a sovereign power that was even greater than they. The people of the United States are greater than any or all of the United States, but they cannot meet together; and none to represent them can meet together, save in the extraordinary and yet unknown event of a second national constitutional convention. They must therefore speak by the chief magistrate of the republic; and so has come his transcendent power.

I have compared that power with the authority exercised in his dominions by the Czar of Russia. It has become a political 2 Woolsey's "Political Science," p. 258.

aphorism that Russia is governed by despotism, tempered by assassination. Enhance human power to a certain point, and it becomes to some men intolerable. As we look back on the dagger of Booth and the Sic semper tyrannis with which he struck home his blow, at the shot of a disappointed office-seeker that cost the life of President Garfield, we cannot but feel that there are fanatics in America, also, who proceed by the methods of fanatics, and are actuated by the blind impulse of destruction in the presence of political absolutism.

But such men are few. There is despotism in American government; but all who look at it with open eyes and honest hearts know that it is despotism in reserve and despotism in division. Russia would centre absolute power once and forever in a single man. We part it between three departments of government; and, however great the share of the executive may be, it is still kept within limits, and held, at most, only for eight years. I say for eight, because American tradition has made a third term impossible.

Our ultimate despot is the people of the United States; but they are the knights in armor that from generation to generation may slumber in the enchanted chambers of the eternal hills. They lay down to rest when a declaration of their rights had been added to the Constitution of the United States by its first ten amendments in the third year of Washington's administration. They rose to action for a moment when, three years later, they found that their ministers of justice had so far misunderstood their meaning as to hold a sovereign State subject to the federal jurisdiction, at the suit of a private individual. Again, at the beginning of this century, they awoke, when party machinery had so far controlled personal patriotism that Aaron Burr had almost been seated in the place which they designed for Thomas Jeffer

son.

A longer period of inaction followed till the time came to proclaim by law what had been before only asserted by the sword, that slavery had become incompatible with free institutions. But the long war that made freedom national had done much more. It had struck at States. It had conquered States. It had borne down with its strong hand barrier after barrier set by former generations to guard that vast and indefinable domain of rights. "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." It had

brought into existence a new class of persons,a great class utterly unfitted to their new position, surrounded by those who had been their masters, distant from those who had been their liberators.

These mill

Two great things remained to be accomplished. ions of slaves, new born into freedom, must be protected in it or given some means of self-protection. And these new relations of the States to the United States, of the old States to the new nation, must be more definitely marked and secured.

Again, the knights in armor stirred in the enchanted chamber. The fourteenth amendment succeeded the thirteenth. The fifteenth soon followed; and the chapter of the Civil War was closed.

But the freedom of the slave was the least of its political consequences. These three amendments of the Constitution readjusted and reset our whole system of fundamental law.

Down to 1868 each State had said for herself, My people shall be free from arbitrary arrests; their liberty and property shall be secure, their rights equal, the law impartially administered, the stranger within my gates protected from wrong as fully as my own sons. Now came back for a brief moment to the scene of action the people of the United States, to say, by the fourteenth amendment, that thenceforth every man should have their guarantee that the State would not recede from these obligations, but they should forever and forever be the foundation stones of American institutions.

Was this great change a welcome one to every State? You well know that it was not. Only absolute power, the absolute power of a three-fourths vote under a written Constitution,- the absolute power of a Congress with the right in each of its Houses to determine on the qualifications of its own members and the admission of members from any recalcitrant State, with the right to pack the jury, even, by admitting to Statehood a row of mining camps on barren mountains, and giving to Nevada an equal vote with Virginia or Massachusetts,- this is what forced the fourteenth, if not the thirteenth amendment, into organic law.

But there it is. It was a slight matter that it hastened the day of negro suffrage, and paved the way for the fifteenth amendment, passed two years later. Whenever and wherever the American negro has education enough to enable him to cast an intelligent vote, he will cast that vote; and he ought to cast it. And, when

ever and wherever he has not such education, he ought not to vote; and, in the long run, he will not vote. Mississippi and South Carolina have put themselves upon solid ground in saying that education must be a condition of suffrage. It is no new doctrine. In the North there is more than one State in which such

has been the law for nearly half a century.

The great change wrought by the fourteenth amendment has been to concede and perpetuate to the United States vast and farreaching national powers, to unify and centralize their government for good or ill.

It has been said that the ideals of the Teutonic race have been in perpetual vibration from one period to another, as the pendulum of time swung to and fro across the ages between two social forces,- Individualism and Collectivism; between the cry of each man for himself, Sauve qui peut, and the broader note of each for all.

If absolute power has risen up in the United States and for the United States, during this century, to a height our fathers never contemplated, it is because we have departed from our Anglo-Saxon inheritance of Individualism; because the people demand more of their government, and have given it more. When Coleridge declared that

"We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does nature live,"

he spoke what is, above all things, true of free institutions. each of them the individual citizen has parted with something. They are the great result of a common contribution; and, whatever they give back, we who receive have paid for, are paying for, whether we recognize it or not.

It was Collectivism that wrote the fourteenth amendment, Collectivism that ratified it, Collectivism that enforces it. Does it protect individual rights, as in no land under the broad heaven they were ever, in any age, protected before? Yes; but only by the sacrifice of other rights of Individualism; only by extension of the sovereignty of the Union at the cost of the sovereignty of the State; only by giving to the courts new authority to control legislatures, and Congress new power to control the citizen; only by giving to the President new laws to execute, of such a kind as put him forward into fields before unoccupied.