pride and unwisdom, her fondness for conquest, her lust of dominion, her thirst of monopoly," etc. Is it any wonder Europe laughs? And yet Franklin was a wise man—fit for Plato's republic; but hardly for the one in the middle regions of North America.

Then take Jefferson's tiresome platitudes about the people, his view of the Presidency, his view even of the Federal Government. Jefferson said that the Federal Government would never be anything "more than the American department of foreign affairs."

"Many considerations," said Madison,1 "seem to place it beyond doubt that the first and most natural attachment of the people will be to the governments of their respective States." They were all wrong, these men : all but a handful of seers like Washington and Hamilton ; but they might have been right if America had continued to be the United States of their day, if America had even continued to be the Massachusetts of young Emerson's and Thoreau's day-before the shrieking Abolitionites came to set everybody by the ears, and the Irish came to replace the New England husbandmen and mechanics, and to manage their politics.

After all, the fabric as designed by the architects of the Constitution has not stood as they meant it to stand: it has not kept to the original plan. The building has gone on, and the work, as so far completed in this year of grace 1902, seems to us to bear a very strong resemblance to other and older institutions of the kind. More and more, faster and faster, does the process and assimilation go on until we now rub our astonished eyes and behold an American empire arisen, 1 Federalist, No. XLIII.

with alien races, bowing the knee to a ruler who sits at Washington, lacking the crown and sceptre it is true, because the wisdom of symbols, although dimly grasped, is not yet practised in the newer state. All the old theories are flung to the winds; all the old pretensions to simplicity. Such luxury as was never heard of in Imperial Rome is practised universally in America: the luxury and improvidence of carelessly gained wealth. An aristocracy, not as ungenerously charged, merely of money, but of manners and culture, is growing, and class distinctions are widely and properly recognized. Slowly a National Church arises from the dead level of Baptistery and Methodism. Poverty as hideous as any in the old world slinks in the slums of the great cities. Homicide and crime is commoner than in Europe. Yet, side by side with these conditions, there are the correlatives of highly organized states: scholarship, munificence, art and letters, a widespread desire for leisure and moral culture.

Briefly, then, after a long period of backwoods seclusion, of introspection—of quarantine, shall we say? -America emerges more tolerant and to us more tolerable. The rough edges are being worn from her character; fifty years ago she spurned the cup as an unholy thing, but now she drinks deep of the draught of Europe, and gives the old lands that flattery which is the sincerest of all flattery, and promises us--the other nations of the earth-a boon companionship.

CHAPTER II

THE GROWTH OF PRESIDENTIAL POWER

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"IF," Mr. Goldwin Smith tells the Americans, you have an empire, you will have an emperor, not perhaps, in the Old World form of a man crowned and sceptred, yet in the shape of centralized and practically autocratic power." "There are only two absolute monarchies in the modern world," remarks M. Bourget, "Russia and America." 1

Let us look into this matter of the growth of Presidential power. We are all of us to-day-democrats and aristocrats-bound hand and foot by those feudal definitions. An emperor means merely the ruler of an empire a king (according to Professor Skeat) is only the elected chief of a people: a monarch is the supreme ruler. May not president, so simple, so innocent in its origin, yet come to signify arbitrary power ??

1 The base wretch who murdered President McKinley declared, "I shot him because he was the ruler, and held such power as I do not think any man should have."

2 Boundless power is not incompatible with the absence of personal pomp and even of titular distinction. The Americans are only following the example of the Romans. "The kingly power in the United States of Australia," remarks Sir Robert Stout, "is less than the President's power in the United States of America. Practically, the kingly power is a mere name. It has no actuality . . . practically the Parliament of the Commonwealth in its limited legislative sphere is supreme. It is true there is a veto power in the

When the founders of the republic divided what Jefferson held to be a necessary evil, the national government, into the three branches, the legislative, executive, and judicial, they intended that while each of these three branches should be independent of each other, in Congress, as representing the people, was to reside the major power.

How little they would have credited the prophet who should have told them that the President would become the most important factor in the government!1

Yet slowly, but surely, the powers of the executive have evolved, until the President has for some time had ascendency over the legislative and judicial. Now the office and its occupant have taken a stride further. Let us see what the President's position is at present based

upon

1. His command of the Army and Navy.

2. His command of the administrative system, including control of the offices and the initiative of administrative work.

3. His veto power.

4. The fact that by the elimination of any independent

Governor-General: but the Governor-General must act even in vetoing a Bill, as he is advised by his ministers." On the other hand, "The kingly power of the United States of America is very much in evidence, and this has been recognized by Americans." See "Abolition of the Presidency," by H. C. Lockwood.

1 "A king for the United States when they first established themselves was impossible. A total rupture from the Old World and all the habits became necessary for them. The name of a king, or monarch, or sovereign had become horrible in their ears. Even to this day they have not learned the difference between arbitrary power retained in the hand of one man, such as that now held by the Emperor over the French, and such hereditary hardship in the States as that which belongs to the Crown in Great Britain." -Anthony Trollope, North America.

action by the presidential electors he has become the direct agent of the national popular will.

It is worthy of note that in none of the wars in which America has been engaged, has the President been so directly concerned with the movements of the armies and fleets as in the conflict with Spain. In that war, for the first time in American history, the President realized in practice the constitutional provision that the President shall actually lead and command in war. At all times, throughout the few brief weeks of hostilities, the President was in telegraphic touch of both land and naval forces. In the concentration of war-ships and transports, and mobilization of armed battalions at points on the sea-board or in the disembarkation of American troops on foreign soil, both were never beyond his instant control. Although these facilities for immediate communication between the Commander-in-Chief of the active fighting force were not absolutely new or novel, since they have been applied by Great Britain in many of her colonial wars, yet the practice awakened the rapturous enthusiasm of the Americans.1

By virtue of what is termed the war-powers of the Constitution, the President has become as powerful as any living monarch, the autocratic ruler of hundreds of thousands of people in Cuba and of millions of people

1 "The great Cæsar at the head of his invincible legions tramped over most of the known world of his day in his career of conquest. The great Bonaparte from his snow-white battle-steed surveyed the field and met and delivered the wager of conflict. The foremost citizen of this republic, McKinley, from his official residence at the American capital, at the touch of a button put in motion fleets which in a few brief hours changed the maps of two continents, and placed a nation, for centuries the foremost in the world, prostrate and powerless at his feet!" I extract this gem of rhetoric from the pages of a popular American magazine.