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of the vast assemblage, and the waving of hats and nandkerchiefs, laughing and weeping, crying, cheering, and embracing, all indicate the emotional crisis. Here, and not in the electoral college or at the polls, the true efficient choice is made, at least it is either in that convention or in its rival. When it is seen how the tide can be made to go by their votes, chairmen of the delegations of twenty States at once will rise to announce the change in the vote of their State. At the convention referred to, Garfield received no votes until the thirty-first ballot, and then only one ; one on the thirty-second, and one on the thirty-third. On the thirty-fourth he rose to seventeen, on the thirty-fifth to fifty. This revealed him as the "dark horse” in the race, and on the thirty-sixth ballot he received 399, the number essential to a choice being 378. The persons who thus reduced the choice of the American people at the polls, to a choice between General Garfield and General W. S. Hancock, whose selection by the Democratic convention was arrived at in the same manner, were as few in number as those who would have decided it in the electoral college, had the spirit of the constitutional provision been found or made practicable, but they were not the same few. So in the subsequent contest between Messrs. Cleveland and Blaine, the " few" whose casting votes determined the selection, in convention, of Cleveland on one side and Blaine on the other, were politicians of New York, to the number of a dozen in each party. Finally the contest was decided for the nation by a plurality, Mr. Blaine has said, of less than one-eleventh of one per cent. of the voters of New York at the polls. But, in theory, and in legal efficiency, every voter even of this small fraction existed as a useless surplus, after the one vote necessary to avoid a tie. None will be so obtuse as to suppose we overlook the value of a larger majority as a means to avoid a strife over the question whether this plurality of one exists. But the legal and constitutional efficiency all centers in the one vote. As all government by majorities is thus reducible in final analysis to a selection by a few, and a decision by one, it is a delusion to suppose that democratic institutions can impart governing efficiency to each individual of the whole numerical mass. The number of persons, in whose breasts it lies to exercise a final efficient choice, on economic or administrative questions, is somewhat larger in republics, than in monarchies, but it is by no means so much larger as many suppose. In America the governing class, as represented by the officers finally chosen to perform the work of the federal and

state governments, is very large, and may be larger than in most countries. In some phases it shows greater cost. Thus the six hundred members who sit in the House of Commons of England, the members of the House of Lords, and we believe the governing councils of most or all of the cities, still do, or until very recently did, serve without pay. In America the national Congress, thirty-nine state and several territorial legislatures, and the common councils of most of the cities, comprising probably 5,000 persons, draw regular salaries. In England thirty-five judges of the courts of record seem to have performed the general and appellate judicial work for 28,000,000 people. We have no similar number of people, among whom the performance of judicial work does not call for the services of a number of judges, at least ten times, as large. Republics are generous in expenditure. No throne-room in Europe, it is believed, costs more than the chamber of the New York councilmen. No palace or public building, for representing the dignity of an equal number of people, equals in expense the state capitol at Albany, or that at Springfield, Ill. The most virtuous and meritorious quality, in the practical working of a republican government founded on manhood suffrage, when brought into comparison with governments professing to represent wealth, land, religion, the army, or other special but powerful interest, is the largeness numerically of the class to which it tries to do the greatest possible good. It may still continue exclusive toward any non-voting class, or despotic toward any class which is sure not to come into potency as a constituency. It is nearly certain to do far more for education, for the dependent, defective, and delinquent classes, for the general promotion of industry, and probably to make more public improvements, than a government which arises out of a condition of industry wherein the voting constituency is more narrow in relative numbers. It will tax capital if it can, and so far as it can, rather than labor. There is great breadth of purpose, and in general a shrewd perception of the drift of the popular weal, as well as wishes, in American politics. In the politics of republics which have a less ample treasury of national earnings to draw upon, the economic results must be less brilliant. The anticipations of the founders of the American republic have not been fully met in several respects. They did not suppose that success in obtaining office would depend so much more on skill in manipulating the machinery of selecting candidates for office, than on skill in performing the duties of office.

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They did not desire so frequent a displacement, of one inexperienced officer, by another equally inexperienced, as often occurs.

They did not foresee the costly political convulsions of the first magnitude, and consequent incurment of expense for armies and navies, which, when spread over the intervening years, would render the military expenses of an unarmed republic fully equal to those of any armed empire.

Questions which it was hoped to submit to the arbitrament of the whole people, or, if of a few, at least of a well-selected and highly intelligent few, seem often to turn on political accidents, in far out-of-the-way constituencies of small intelligence. The question whether Hayes was elected turns for the moment on the point whether a negress named Eliza Cranston, in an obscure parish in Louisiana, speaks the truth. Accidental segments, insignificant fractions, and small self-constituted and self-seeking coteries of party conventions of manipulators, remind us by their vehemence and power, that temporarily the pyramid of state rests on its apex. The few who control are too accidental, too uninformed, too untrustworthy and too extra-hazardous, to deserve to have such a load of responsibility thrust on them.* An aristocracy that becomes such by commanding armies or by acquiring lands, is not, in the long run, inferior to one that becomes such by skillful management of primary conventions. In adjusting the slavery question by popular convulsion, instead of, as in Russia, by executive discretion,† the American Republic has shown that where a very large number of the people are interested in an evil, a government wherein the initiative may be said to spring from the common people, and go upward, may be less awake to the demands of economic, ethical, and moral progress than one in which a single enlightened ruler may enjoy an absolute confi dence and unchangeable tenure of power.

* Upon this, Mr. de Tocqueville, in his " Democracy in America," remarked: "In the immense crowd which throngs the avenues to power in the United States, I found very fow men who displayed that manly candor and masculine independence of opinion which frequently distinguished the Americans in former times, and which constitutes the leading feature in distinguished characters wheresoever they may be found. It seems at first sight as if all the minds of the Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they follow the same route. A stranger does indeed sometimes meet with Americans who dissent from the rigor of these formularies, with men who deplore the effects of the laws, the mutability and the ignorance of democracy-who even go so far as to observe the evil tendencies which impair the national character, and to point out such remedies as it might be possible to apply, they hold a different language in public."

+ Vide "Russia," post, § 594, Ch. XIII.

but

The feature which is most original and admirable is equal representation of population according to numbers in the House of Representatives, and of large and small States as equals with each other in the Senate. This has introduced into the United States Senate a spirit whose aim is to temper power with equity. It has been, at most times, the ablest because the most equitable deliberative body in the world. The British House of Lords might be restored to vitality by such a federation of the empire as would embody in it something of the dignity of the American Senate. Capital might be represented in it more perfectly than now, and in addition the various states and dominions, now governed by Parliament.

168. Diversity of Functions and Objects.-Governments are further classified as either military or civil, provisional or permanent, constitutional or absolute, of mutual checks and balances or sovereign in some one department, tributary or supreme, temporal or spiritual, religious or secular, general or local, centralized or distributed (decentralized).

An absolute government has some one department, or body, which possesses at least legislative omnipotence, and which, in the last resort, can effectively control all other departments. In this sense, Great Britain is an absolute government, and its parliament possesses legislative omnipotence, in itself, and final absolute power over all other departments. It can declare the throne vacant, as

it did on the occasion of the forced abdication of James II. It can change the succession, as it has done on several occasions, electing a new family to reign, and prescribing a new order of inheritance for the crown. Doubtless, on what it deemed a sufficient provocation, or reason, it could terminate the heritable quality in the crown, and make it elective. This would be styled, in English parlance, a revolution, and a change in the fundamental law. The English parliament, however, has the power to change the fundamental law by which it is bound, and this makes it absolute, or a law unto itself. It has power to impeach, and execute, all judges who should oppose its will, as well as all ministers of the crown who should nullify its laws or disobey its commands. The proceedings of the Long Parliament, and of the Protectorate under Cromwell, including the execution of Charles I., are, out of deference to the kingly principle, usually assumed, in English discussion, to be unconstitutional and revolutionary. They were, however, assertions of the practical omnipotence of parliament, which underlie and cause the present supremacy of the House of

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Commons. Without these, and the subsequent parliamentary revolutions, it would not to-day be the theory of the English government that parliament is supreme over the crown, and that in parliament the House of Commons is supreme over the House of Lords. Still, the particular machinery through which the Commons assert their supremacy, over other branches of the government, is that, by means of the principle of responsible government, the House of Commons controls the ministers of the crown, and, as these have the power at all times to appoint new peers, they can at all times, through the appointment of new peers, control the House of Lords.

The United States, on the other hand, is a government of mutual checks and balances, or wherein absolute sovereignty is not lodged in any one department, but each may check the other.

The departments for this purpose are (1) the executive, of which the President is chief, and which includes the cabinet and all subordinate officers (about 120,000 in all) of the civil service, the diplomatic officers and consuls, the army and navy ;

(2) The legislative department, consisting of both houses of Congress;

(3) The judiciary, comprising all the federal courts, viz., the Supreme Court of the United States, circuit courts, district courts, territorial courts, court of claims, and courts of the District of Columbia.

The executive, legislative, and judicial departments act as checks upon and balance each other in certain ways. If the executive and Congress are dissatisfied with the workings of the Supreme Court they have the power by law to reconstitute the court, expand or reduce the number of judges, and, in case it is expanded, the President has power by the selection of the added judges to determine the political complexion of the court, and in some degree the quality of its judicial decisions upon the class of legal questions he has in mind at the time he makes the appointment. Action of this kind is held in disfavor, however, as large numbers of the people regard the Supreme Court as a body that should not be subordinated to the views of the President and Congress in its judicial decisions, even where they bear in their effect upon the political departments of the government.

The two houses of Congress have also the power to impeach and remove either the President, or the judges of the Supreme Court, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Supreme Court has, by judicial construction, in consequence