administering
power and should bear full and specific responsibility; safeguards
against ill-considered action being provided in two directions, by the
people on the one hand, and on the other hand by law and custom, these
latter being considered historically, as an organic growth. He finds the
elements and essentials of this doctrine in our Constitution, though
somewhat obscured by the old "literary" theory of checks and balances.
He finds it more fully acknowledged in the British Constitution. He
finds it originating in our English race, enunciated at Runnymede,
developing by a slow but natural growth in English history, sanctioned
in the Petition of Right, the Revolution of 1688, and the Declaration of
Rights, achieved for us in our own Revolution, and illustrated by the
implied powers of Congress and the more directly exercised powers of the
House of Commons. It is a corollary of this doctrine that the President
of the United States, to whom in the veto and in his peculiar relations
to the Senate our Constitution gives a very real legislative function,
should associate himself closely with Congress, not merely as one who
may annul but also as one who initiates policies and helps to translate
them into laws. In his _Congressional Government_, begun when he was a
student in Princeton and finished before he was twenty-eight years old,
Mr. Wilson clearly indicates his dissatisfaction with the tradition
which would set the executive apart from the legislative power as a
check against it and not a cooeperating element; and it is a remarkable
proof of the man's integrity and persistent personality that one of his
first acts as President was to go before the Congress as if he were its
agent.

If any proof of his democracy were required, one might point to his
rather surprising statement, which he has repeated more than once, that
the chief value of Congressional debate is to arouse and inform public
opinion. He regards the will of the people as the real source of
governmental policy. Yet he is very impatient of those theories of the
rights of man which found favor in France in the eighteenth century and
have been the mainspring of democratic movements on the Continent of
Europe. He regards political liberty, as we know it in this country, as
a peculiar possession of the English race to which, in all that concerns
jurisprudence, we Americans belong.

The other safeguard against arbitrary action by the combined
legislative