incongruous, so that, as history shows, they tend to severance. The President is the head of the nation, the chief magistrate, the common father of the people, to whom they write when in trouble or deeply moved, to whom they feel they have a right of personal access as primitive in its simplicity as if the office were still a tribal chieftainship; but he is also the premier of the administration, a busy man of affairs, with so many things to attend to that there do not seem to be hours enough in the day for them all. The attempt to compass these two functions is a killing task, fraught with great perils to the individual incumbent and to the public welfare. With the establishment of a direct parliamentary basis for the government, the actual management of affairs will naturally tend to pass into the hands of groups of statesmen trained to their work by gradations of public service, their fitness attested by success in coping with their responsibilities under the direct and continuous scrutiny and criticism of Congress. The presidency will tend to assume an honorary and a ceremonial character, and will find therein its most satisfactory conditions of dignity and usefulness.

This ultimate type of government, while it will have a parliamentary forum and will follow parliaentary usages in its ordinary mode of expression, rliamentary in its nature. The limita

stitution, and the direction taken

by constitutional development, provide an exclusively executive structure for the administration, and it will be independent of parliamentary vicissitudes. The government will represent the will of the nation, as expressed at the presidential election. Congress will have no power to suppress national volition, but it will possess the independent, but no less important, function of serving as the agency of the moral inhibitions which should attend the exercise of the will, insuring due consideration of all interests, and circumspection of procedure. Congress will retain the power to inhibit altogether any determination of the government requiring legislative assent, but will have no power to prevent the government from shaping its proposals, defining exactly its position, and confronting the opposition with an explicit responsibility for which it must answer to the people. Having reached such a position, the administration of the government will have nothing to ask of party but the cultivation of public sentiment and the propagation of opinion. Party organization will therefore tend to revert to more simple structure and to become dependent upon spontaneous effort, while its present violence will disappear. Something like the ease and placidity in such matters, which now obtain under democratic government in Switzerland, may ensue. The same influences will cause claims of public employment, based on partisan service, to decline in importance, and the

ordinary tests of competency, such as exist in the business world, will prevail in the public service also. The empirical influences which now pervade the sphere of government will also decline, and the management of public affairs will take on a more scientific character. At present, At present, intellectual authority has no means of proper contact with legislation. Expert advice is regarded by the people with a distrust not unreasonable in view of the way in which authorities differ, and of the extent to which charlatanry assumes the air of wisdom. But trusted leadership may resort to any consultation that it finds advantageous, and thus the resources of special ability and information may be brought directly to bear upon the elucidation of any question of public policy.

Such a system of government would preserve everything of value in the parliamentary system of government, while avoiding its defects. There is an inherent weakness in the parliamentary type of government, suggesting the possibility that in the end it may turn out to have been after all a transitory phase of political development. Already signs multiply that parliamentary institutions are a melancholy failure on the continent of Europe; and in England, where the type was formed, they seem to be sustained by the force of traditions of behavior which are gradually weakening. Perhaps the most remarkable of the passages in "The Present Discontents," which surprise one by their miracu

lous prescience, is that in which Burke called attention to the fundamental requirement for the successful operation of the parliamentary system. He said: "The popular election of magistrates, and popular disposition of rewards and honors, is one of the first advantages of a free state. Without it, or something equivalent to it, perhaps the people cannot long enjoy the substance of freedom; certainly none of the vivifying energy of good government. The frame of our commonwealth did not admit of such an actual election; but it provided as well and (while the spirit of the constitution is preserved) better for all the effects of it than by the method of suffrage in any democratic state whatever."

What Burke prophesied was indeed accomplished to the letter, as Bagehot has shown in his commentary on the English constitution. The development of the cabinet system enabled the English people to elect their government, through the agency of Parliament as an electoral college, with the peculiar excellence that the college continued to preside over its work, and to test its worth, with power to undo it and refer the matter to the constituencies for a fresh declaration of public opinion. But the parliamentary type of government was the product of aristocratic control, and, with the increase of democratic forces, its adjustments are being disturbed, and processes of change are perceptible that may impair its effi

ciency. The conditions, which make parliamentary government a system of national choice, will have been destroyed if the constitution of the government becomes a composition of the forces of parliamentary factions, in which case the possibility is conceivable of ministries as poorly embodying the national will, and as unstable in their power, as those which flit across the stage of public affairs in France. It is to be hoped that the noble traditions of duty and responsibility which have been created in English public life will be a sufficient protection against degradation, and will safeguard every change; but England has yet to make terms with democracy, while every advance which America achieves in the art of government is firmly based upon democratic foundations. Certainly, when the President shall have been converted into a Grand Elector, whose function is to constitute the government, every excellence which Bagehot claimed for the parliamentary system will have been gained for the presidential type of government, and both as the archetype of national unity, and as a practical institution of government, it will comprehend every element of majesty and strength. Such a circumstance as that the actual

1 This forecast of the ultimate type of American government, based upon direct inference from the actual tendencies of our politics, agrees with the conclusions reached by Mr. Herbert Spencer, upon philosophic grounds, as to the final outcome of political evolution. Mr. Spencer says, "Concerning the ultimate executive