ing the President of what people think, by his dictating the
subjects the people shall take up, by his sorting out the men whom the
people shall notice, this great ceaseless Meeting of ninety million men
we call the United States--comes to order.

CHAPTER V

THE PRESIDENT SAYS "LOOK!"

Our American President, if one merely reads what the Constitution says
about him, is a rather weak-looking character.

The founders of the country did not intend him to be anybody in
particular--if it could be helped. They were discouraged about allowing
governments to be efficient. Not very much that was constructive to do
was handed over to him. And the most important power they thought it
would do for him to have was the veto or power to say "No."

Possibly if our fathers had believed in liberty more they would have
allowed more people to have some; or if they had believed in democracy
more, or trusted the people more, they would have thought it would do to
let them have leaders, but they had just got away. They felt timid about
human nature and decided that the less constructive the government was
and the less chance the government had to be concrete, to interpret a
people, to make opportunities and turn out events, the better.

Looked at at first sight no more elaborate, impenetrable, water-tight
arrangement for keeping a government from letting in an idea or ever
having one of its own or ever doing anything for anybody, could have
been conceived than the Constitution of the United States, as the
average President interprets it.

Each branch of the government is arranged carefully to keep any other
branch from doing anything, and then the people, every four years, look
the whole country over for some new man they think will probably leave
them alone more than anybody--and put him in for President.

Looking at it narrowly and by itself, all that a President selected like
this could ever expect in America to put in his time on, would seem to
be--being the country's most importantly helpless man--the man who has
been given the honour of being a somewhat more prominent failure in
America than any one else would be allowed to be.

He stops people for four years. Other people stop him for four years.
Then with a long happy sigh, at the end of his term, he slips back into
real life and begins to do things.

This has been the more or less sedately disguised career of the typical
American President. Merely reading the Const