ower is not
in the gift of the legislature. No presidential country
needs to form daily delicate opinions, or is helped in
forming them."

Then when the people do go to the ballot-box, they cannot
intelligently influence the policy of the government. If they vote for
a president, then congress may have a policy quite different from his;
if they vote for members of congress, they cannot change the opinions
of the president. If the president changes his cabinet at any time,
they have nothing to say about it, for its members are not important
as wheels in the legislative machinery. Congress may pass a bill of
which the people express their disapproval at the first opportunity
when they choose a new congress, but still it may remain on the
statute-book because the senate holds views different from the newly
elected House, and cannot be politically changed until after a long
series of legislative elections. As Professor Woodrow Wilson well puts
it in an able essay:--[31]

"Public opinion has no easy vehicle for its judgments, no
quick channels for its action. Nothing about the system is
direct and simple. Authority is perplexingly subdivided and
distributed, and responsibility has to be hunted down in
out-of-the-way corners. So that the sum of the whole matter
is that the means of working for the fruits of good
government are not readily to be found. The average citizen
may be excused for esteeming government at best but a
haphazard affair upon which his vote and all his influence
can have but little effect. How is his choice of
representative in congress to affect the policy of the
country as regards the questions in which he is most
interested if the man for whom he votes has no chance of
getting on the standing committee which has virtual charge
of those questions? How is it to make any difference who is
chosen president? Has the president any great authority in
matters of vital policy? It seems a thing of despair to get
any assurance that any vote he may cast will even in an
infinitesimal degree affect the essential courses of
administration. There are so many cooks mixing their
ingredients in the national broth that it seems hopeless,
this thing of changing one cook at a time."

Under such a system it cannot be expected that the people will take
the same deep interest in elections and feel a