The fundamental doctrine of our government as applied by men of the type of Madison, Story and Webster, is that it is not safe to permit one person to make a law controlling other persons, and then himself enforce it against them. We maintain that it is still useful for us to so arrange political authority that one body of persons shall make general rules of conduct and then, as Locke says, go about their business knowing they must live under the rules they have made. One is reminded of the protectionist statesman caught smuggling at the port of New York. After these general rules of conduct are made, there must be a body of judges, free, independent, non-partisan men, carefully selected, who shall apply these general rules made by the legislature, to the concrete cases and disputes which occur. Then the executive-still another set of men-shall see that the laws thus made and interpreted are carried out. Only with this sort of separation can we be sure of liberty. But we have always bridged this separation to prevent isolation. The governor or president may recommend legislation and is applauded by most right-minded men when he invokes public opinion to decide whether he or the legislature is right. He may also veto bills which do not suit him. The court may check the legislature when it makes laws which are contrary to the constitution which authorizes their enactment. The legislature ratifies the executive's appointments and participates with him in the war power and in the making of treaties, as well as performs the judicial function of trying impeachments.

Now we ask for a further bridge in order that government may be made better, and may tend less to the extremes under which France has suffered. We contend that the executive and the legislative departments are particularly supplementary to each other. The legislative function is a deliberative one and needs the concert of many minds. This is for the acceptance and ratification of legislation, for the expression of the popular will. But legislation is made up of three elements,— initiation, drafting, and ratification. The last should never be done by any other organ than the legislature. But the initiation can be done by anyone, from the humblest citizens to the President of the United States. Now if anyone may initiate, why may one not

do so in a frank and practical way on the floor of the house of Congress or legislature as well as through a message? Are the legislators cowards, or such "a feeble folk" that they cannot face one man and resist his will or charm? If he may initiate, why may he not bring in a bill which explicitly states what he wishes to say and permit the legislators to ask him questions about it? Should any honest legislator hesitate to answer by a vote "yes" or "no" to such a bill brought in by a man who carries for the people a great responsibility? Of whom would they be afraid; of the man who is the executive; of their constituents; or of their consciences?

I have said that the legislature and the executive are supplementary. It is doubtless well that the senate must confirm appointments, though very stupid things are often done by the senators with this power. It is a deliberative check on thoughtless or too radical executives. It is well that the reason of a group effect this check. So is it well that the executive be permitted to galvanize the somewhat unorganized legislature into action, but not to control that action. The executive is the conspicuous head to whom the people look. It is his administration that is called a failure if no good legislation is enacted. He alone is the representative of the whole body of the people. He is the will of the party, as the legislature may be said to be its reason. The will must lead, the reason check. The will would appoint, the reason ratify; the will would propose a law, the reason accept or reject it.

proposal that the executive Mainly the politicians, and It is plain that legislation

It

Who are the opponents of this perform this important function? generally those in the opposition. will have leadership. It is plain that party organization directs our affairs, and there is as yet no substitute for its direction. is therefore plain that the legislature will be directed by the force which directs the party. Therefore it is plain that either the executive or the party boss will be the initiating force in important legislation, for its production or its prevention. And therefore, if the executive and the party leader are different persons, the executive cannot get to the legislature directly; his initiative must pass through the political organization at the will of the boss.

One is disposed to follow the example of Montesquieu and turn to the English government for an illustration of the needed organization. There the executive is the party leader, or the leader becomes the executive. The The person with power is shouldered with responsibility, or the person with responsibility also has the power. The king needs as leader, the commons need as leader, the only person whom the majority will follow; the great leader with all the wires in his hand is made the executive. The initiative is his.

Washington, D. C.

EDGAR DAWSON.

ERRATUM

By an oversight, the address of Mr. Dawson is erroneously given herein as Washington, D. C., when it should have been New York City.

SIR WILLIAM MONSON

The hardest thing to predicate about a man is whether he will be remembered when he is dead; and if so for how long. "It is enough," declares a great American, "if one competes successfully with his own generation," and in that view must lie whatever satisfaction most of us will ever get of fame. There is, indeed, but one sure way to keep one's memory alive. Among the paths to immortality,- an eminent ability in the destruction of one's kind, some superhuman service to the race, some more than usual villainy, some freak of fortune, character, or birth,-all men are equal till one writes a book;-and truly if ever man had reason to believe the pen mightier than the sword it is Sir William Monson. Among the daring seamen of Elizabeth he was by no means the least; among the counsellors of her Stuart successors his voice was not the mildest; among the upholders of English naval supremacy he occupies a not unenviable place. Yet were it not for the inconsequential fact that in his later years the old sea-dog chanced to commit his growls to paper, we might well ask in vain of him, as of a multitude of other worthies, stout men of head and hand who in their day did no little to direct the destinies of the world,-"Who was Sir William Monson?"

Yet it would seem that his career might entitle him to remembrance, even had he not taken to driving quill when he left off wielding cutlass. There are greater figures than his in the stirring times when he played his part among the world's affairs, but there is scarcely one which touched those affairs on so many sides, or was so typical a product of the times. Certainly there is not one whom we can now recall that managed to live long enough to fight the Armada at one end of his life and to command a Ship-Money fleet at the other; least of all one so capable of recording his experiences. Not without high lights and purple patches which make it well worth recovering from the semi-oblivion into which it has fallen, his long career is a peculiarly accurate type of the successive generations which he adorned. And if you would find your way behind Elizabethan scenes and see how that magnificent

spectacle was staged; if you would learn somewhat of its actors at first hand, and feel the stir of those days when carrack and galleon still sailed the seas, when Raleigh sought El Dorado and Drake led his handful of adventurers to sack the Treasure House of the World, go find Sir William, sit down beside the chimney fire and listen to the old sea tales which have been the inspiration of two centuries of naval preeminence.

In nearly all of its earlier characteristics his life offers the typical features of his generation, and it is not the worse for that. It has been long since the boy who runs away to sea played the part in literature which he once played in life; but when young Monson exchanged the Balliol quadrangle for the deck of a privateer, neither in literature nor in life was such an escapade so rare as it has since become, for the world was then crowded with great events whose principal theatre was the sea. William the Silent was leading his countrymen in that desperate revolt against the Spanish power which was to become a landmark of liberty; Henry of Navarre was waiting his opportunity amid the civil wars which devastated France to make his way to Ivry and the crown; and every port of Spain and Portugal rang with busy preparation for the mighty enterprise which with the aid of Parma's army, then gathering in the Netherlands, was to crush England and Holland and so reëstablish the supremacy of Spain and the Vatican, now sadly shrunk beneath the strokes of the reformed communions. Hawkins and Drake and Frobisher, who had dealt some of the shrewdest of those blows, were then in the heyday of their spectacular careers, and among the crews of those innumerable vessels then pushing out from every English port to spoil the Spaniard there were many who, like this Lincolnshire youth, were fired by the exploits of their famous countrymen to draw a sword for England and her faith and, as Monson observes of himself, "inclined to see the world," and, it might well be, make their fortunes.

To the oncoming generations each new age offers its peculiar opportunity. What the Crusades were to the young knight of the Middle Ages, what the plunder of Mexico and Peru was to the Spaniard of the early sixteenth century; what the camp was to Napoleonic France, and business to nineteenth-century