uencing the
destinies of the Republic as much as his friends expected him to do, and
indeed as he expected himself.'

'I have often,' I said, 'wondered how you and Tocqueville, and the other
eminent men who composed the committee for preparing the Constitution,
could have made one incapable of duration, and also incapable of change.'

'What,' he asked, 'are the principal faults which you find in the
Constitution?'

'First,' I said, 'that you gave to your President absolute authority over
the army, the whole patronage of the most centralised and the most
place-hunting country in the world, so that there was not one of your
population of 36,000,000 whose interests he could not seriously affect;
and, having thus armed him with irresistible power, you gave him the
strongest possible motives to employ it against the Constitution by
turning him out at the end of his four years, incapable of re-election,
unpensioned and unprovided for, so that he must have gone from the Elysee
Bourbon to a debtor's prison.

'Next, that, intending your President to be the subordinate Minister of
the Assembly, you gave him the same origin, and enabled him to say, "I
represent the people as much as you do, indeed much more. They _all_
voted for me, only a fraction of them voted for any one of you." Then
that origin was the very worst that could possibly be selected, the votes
of the uneducated multitude; you must have foreseen that they would give
you a demagogue or a charlatan. The absence of a second Chamber, and the
absence of a power of dissolution, are minor faults, but still serious
ones. When the President and the Assembly differed, they were shut up
together to fight it out without an umpire.'

'That we gave the President too much power,' said Beaumont, 'the event
has proved. But I do not see how, in the existing state of feeling in
France, we could have given him less. The French have no self-reliance.
They depend for everything on their administrators. The first revolution
and the first empire destroyed all their local authorities and also their
aristocracy. Local authorities may be gradually re-created, and an
aristocracy may gradually arise, but till these things have been done the
Executive must be strong.

'If he had been re-eligible, our first President would virtually have
been President for life. Having decided that his office should be
temporary, we were forced to forbid his immediate re-election.

'With respect to his b