on breaking down the
constitutional authority of the Executive.

Going into the Presidency fresh from this drama, in 1869, General Grant
went out of the Presidency in 1877, after a drama not less impressive
and instructive had been enacted under his eyes, which threatened for
many weeks to result in a complete failure of the machinery provided by
the American Constitution for the lawful and orderly transmission of the
executive authority. It did, in fact, result in the adoption by Congress
of an extra-constitutional expedient, by which the orderly transmission
of the executive authority was secured, but the lawful transmission of
it--as I believe, and as I think I have reason to know General Grant
believed--was defeated.

Whether the constitutional machinery would or would not have carried us
safely through if the final strain had been put upon it, is now an
academic question not here to be discussed. But the final strain was
evaded by the adoption of the extra-constitutional expedient to which I
refer. An Electoral Commission was created by Congress to decide by
which of two sets of Presidential electors claiming to have been chosen
for that purpose the Presidential vote of certain States should be cast;
and it is a curious circumstance that General Grant, who had seen his
executive predecessor saved from removal by a single vote in the Senate
in 1869, saw his executive successor established in the White House, in
1877, by a single vote in this Electoral Commission.

It would have been strange indeed had the experience of General Grant
failed to impress upon him, with at least equal force, the advantages to
liberty of a hereditary executive acting as the fountain of social
honour, and the disadvantages to liberty of an elective executive
tending to become a distributing reservoir of political patronage.

I once had a curious talk bearing on this subject with General Grant
after he had retired from the Presidency. He had dined with me to meet
and discuss a matter of some importance with a Mexican friend of mine,
Senor Romero, long Minister of Finance in Mexico, and now Mexican Envoy
at Washington. When I next met the ex-President he reverted with great
interest to something which had been incidentally said at this dinner
about the experiment of empire made in Mexico by Iturbide, the general
who finally broke the power of Spain in that viceroyalty, and secured
its independence. I showed him certain documents which I