us Act was passed. Yet Charles II. succeeded,
only two years later, in making himself independent of Parliament. In
1789, while the States-General assembled at Versailles, the Spanish
Cortes, older than Magna Charta and more venerable than our House of
Commons, were summoned after an interval of generations, but they
immediately prayed the King to abstain from consulting them, and to make
his reforms of his own wisdom and authority. According to the common
opinion, indirect elections are a safeguard of conservatism. But all the
Assemblies of the French Revolution issued from indirect elections. A
restricted suffrage is another reputed security for monarchy. But the
Parliament of Charles X., which was returned by 90,000 electors,
resisted and overthrew the throne; while the Parliament of Louis
Philippe, chosen by a Constitution of 250,000, obsequiously promoted the
reactionary policy of his Ministers, and in the fatal division which, by
rejecting reform, laid the monarchy in the dust, Guizot's majority was
obtained by the votes of 129 public functionaries. An unpaid legislature
is, for obvious reasons, more independent than most of the Continental
legislatures which receive pay. But it would be unreasonable in America
to send a member as far as from here to Constantinople to live for
twelve months at his own expense in the dearest of capital cities.
Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor
of Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by the
Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from
the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the Republic as widely as
Monarchy from Democracy, for he is expected to make 70,000 changes in
the public service; fifty years ago John Quincy Adams dismissed only two
men. The purchase of judicial appointments is manifestly indefensible;
yet in the old French monarchy that monstrous practice created the only
corporation able to resist the king. Official corruption, which would
ruin a commonwealth, serves in Russia as a salutary relief from the
pressure of absolutism. There are conditions in which it is scarcely a
hyperbole to say that slavery itself is a stage on the road to freedom.
Therefore we are not so much concerned this evening with the dead letter
of edicts and of statutes as with the living thoughts of men. A century
ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had one audience of a
Master in Chancery was made to pay for t