n can be formed, by the
establishment of an independent national Executive?

This was the question which was met and answered only after long
debates, and with infinite difficulty, by the American Constitutional
Convention of 1787. It is more than probable that this convention could
never have been held without the influence and the presence of George
Washington, who presided over its deliberations; and it is as certain as
anything human can be, that the constitution which it framed would never
have been accepted by the people of the States if they had not known
that the executive office created by it would be filled by him.

The political safeguards put about the American Executive by the
constitution may or may not always resist such a strain as has already
more than once been put upon them. The seceding States, in their
constitution adopted at Montgomery in 1861, tried to strengthen these
safeguards by extending the presidential term to six years, and making
the President re-eligible only after an interval of six years more. But
all our national experience goes to show that the more difficult it is
for a mere majority of the people to make or unmake the authority which
sets a final sanction upon the execution of the laws, the greater will
be the safety of the public liberty and of private rights.

So true is this that every American who witnessed, at London in 1887,
the Jubilee of the Queen, felt, and was glad to feel, with a natural and
instinctive sympathy, the honest contagion of that magnificent outburst
of the loyalty of a great and free people to the hereditary
representative of their historic liberties and of their historic law. I
am sure that no intelligent Englishman can have witnessed the
tremendous outpouring of the American people into New York on April 30,
1889, to do honour there to the hundredth anniversary of the first
inauguration of George Washington, without a kindred emotion.

To compare with the significance of either of these scenes that of the
gigantic cosmopolitan fair dedicated at Paris in 1889 by President
Carnot to the 'principles of 1789' is to exhaust the resources of the
ridiculous.

IV

The antagonism which now exists between France and the Third Republic
certainly did not exist between France and the ancient monarchy. The
members of the Etats-Generaux of 1789, who were so soon permitted, by
the incapacity of Louis XVI., to resolve that body into the chaotic mob
which assumed t