entertained by the
convention. Any such idea is completely negatived by their action of the
6th of September. The express purpose of the final arrangement made on
that day was to admit the House of Representatives to active
participation in the office of determining who should have been elected
president. It was expressly declared that this work was too important to
be left to the Senate alone. What, then, would the convention have said
to the preposterous notion that this work might safely be left to the
presiding officer of the Senate? The convention were keenly alive to any
imaginable grant of authority that might enable the Senate to grow into
an oligarchy. What would they have said to the proposal to create a
monocrat _ad hoc_, an official permanently endowed by virtue of his
office with the function of king-maker?

[Sidenote: The convention foresaw imaginary dangers, but not the real
ones.]

In this connection it is worth our while to observe that in no respect
has the actual working of the Constitution departed so far from the
intentions of its framers as in the case of their provisions concerning
the executive. Against a host of possible dangers they guarded most
elaborately, but the dangers and inconveniences against which we have
actually had to contend they did not foresee. It will be observed that
Wilson's proposal for a direct election of the president by the people
found little favour in the convention. The schemes that were seriously
considered oscillated back and forth between an election by the national
legislature and an election by a special college of electors. The
electors might be chosen by a popular vote, or by the state
legislatures, or in any such wise as each state might see fit to
determine for itself. In point of fact, electors were chosen by the
legislature in New Jersey till 1816; in Connecticut till 1820; in New
York, Delaware, and Vermont, and with one exception in Georgia, till
1824; in South Carolina till 1868. Massachusetts adopted various plans,
and did not finally settle down to an election by the people until 1828.
Now there were several reasons why the Federal Convention was afraid to
trust the choice of the president directly to the people. One was that
very old objection, the fear of the machinations of demagogues, since
people were supposed to be so easily fooled. As already observed, the
democratic sentiment in the convention was such as we should now call
weak. Another reas