either to maintain a Court or to corrupt the legislature; nor can he seduce the virtue of the citizens by the gift of titles of nobility, for such titles are altogether forbidden. Subject to these precautions, he was meant by the constitution-framers to resemble the State governor and the British king, not only in being the head of the executive, but in standing apart from and above political parties. He was to represent the nation as a whole, as the governor represented the State commonwealth. The independence of his position, with nothing either to gain or to fear from Congress, would, it was hoped, leave him free to think only of the welfare of the people.

This idea appears in the method provided for the election of a President. To have left the choice of the chief magistrate to a direct popular vote over the whole country would have raised a dangerous excitement, and would have given too much encouragement to candidates of merely popular gifts. To have entrusted it to Congress would have not only subjected the executive to the legislature in violation of the principle which requires these departments to be kept distinct, but have tended to make him the creature of one particular faction instead of the choice of the nation. Hence the device of a double election was adopted, perhaps with a faint reminiscence of the methods by which the Doge was then still chosen at Venice and the Emperor in Germany. The Constitution directs each State to choose a number of presidential electors equal to the number of its representatives in both Houses of Congress. Some weeks later, these electors meet in each State on a day fixed by law, and give their votes in writing for the President and Vice-President.2 The votes are transmitted, sealed up, to the capital and there opened by the president of the Senate in the presence of both Houses and counted. To preserve the electors from the influence of faction,

equal powers. The Americans hoped to restrain their President not merely by the shortness of his term, but also by diminishing the power which they left to him; and this they did by setting up another authority to which they entrusted certain executive functions, making its consent necessary to the validity of certain classes of the President's executive acts. This is the Senate, whereof more anon.

1 See the remarks of Mr. Wilson in the Pennsylvania Convention. Elliot's Debates, vol. ii. p. 511.

2 Originally the person who received most votes was deemed to have been chosen President, and the person who stood second, Vice-President. This led to confusion, and was accordingly altered by the twelfth constitutional amendment, adopted in 1804, which provides that the President and Vice-President shall be voted for separately.

it is provided that they shall not be members of Congress, nor holders of any Federal office. This plan was expected to secure the choice by the best citizens of each State, in a tranquil and deliberate way, of the man whom they in their unfettered discretion should deem fittest to be chief magistrate of the Union. Being themselves chosen electors on account of their personal merits, they would be better qualified than the masses to select an able and honourable man for President. Moreover, as the votes are counted promiscuously, and not by States, each elector's voice would have its weight. He might be in a minority in his own State, but his vote would nevertheless tell because it would be added to those given by electors in other States for the same candidate.

No part of their scheme seems to have been regarded by the constitution-makers of 1787 with more complacency than this,1 although no part had caused them so much perplexity. No part has so utterly belied their expectations. The presidential electors have become a mere cog-wheel in the machine; a mere contrivance for giving effect to the decision of the people. Their personal qualifications are a matter of indifference. They have no discretion, but are chosen under a pledge-a pledge of honour merely, but a pledge which has never (since 1796) been violated -to vote for a particular candidate. In choosing them the people virtually choose the President, and thus the very thing which the men of 1787 sought to prevent has happened,-the President is chosen by a popular vote. Let us see how this has come to pass.

In the first two presidential elections (in 1789 and 1792) the independence of the electors did not come into question, because everybody was for Washington, and parties had not yet been fully developed. Yet in the election of 1792 it was generally understood that electors of one way of thinking were to vote for Clinton as their second candidate (i.e. for Vice-President) and those of the other side for John Adams. In the third election (1796) no pledges were exacted from electors, but the election contest in which they were chosen was conducted on party lines, and although, when the voting by the electors arrived, some few votes

"The mode of appointment of the chief magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system which has escaped without some censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents."-Federalist, No. lxvii., cf. No. 1. and the observations of Mr. Wilson in the Convention of Pennsylvania.

were scattered among other persons, there were practically only two presidential candidates before the country, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, for the former of whom the electors of the Federalist party, for the latter those of the Republican (Democratic)1 party were expected to vote. The fourth election was a regular party struggle, carried on in obedience to party arrangements. Both Federalists and Republicans put the names of their candidates for President and Vice-President before the country, and round these names the battle raged. The notion of leaving any freedom or discretion to the electors had vanished, for it was felt that an issue so great must and could be decided by the nation alone. From that day till now there has never been any question of reviving the true and original intent of the plan of double election,2 and consequently nothing has ever turned on the personality of the electors. They are now so little significant that to enable the voter to know for which set of electors his party desires him to vote, it is thought well to put the name of the presidential candidate whose interest they represent at the top of the voting ticket on which their own names are printed.

The completeness and permanence of this change has been assured by the method which now prevails of choosing the electors. The Constitution leaves the method to each State, and in the earlier days many States entrusted the choice to their legislatures. But as democratic principles became developed, the practice of choosing the electors by direct popular vote, originally adopted by Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, spread by degrees through the other States, till by 1832 South Carolina was the only State which retained the method of appointment by the legislature. She dropped it in 1868, and popular election now rules everywhere. In some States the electors were for a time chosen by districts, like members of the House of Representatives. But the plan of choice by a single

1 The party then called Republican has for the last sixty years or so been called Democratic. The party now called Republican did not arise till 1854.

2 In 1876 the suggestion was thrown out that the disputed election of that year might be settled by the exercise of free choice on the part of the electors; but the idea found no favour with the politicians.

3 This, however, is merely matter of State law. Any State could go back to choice by the legislature. Colorado, not having time, after her admission to the Union in 1876, to provide by law for a popular choice of electors to vote in the election of a President in the November of that year, left the choice to the legislature, but now elects its presidential electors by popular vote like the other States.

popular vote over the whole of the State found increasing favour, seeing that it was in the interest of the party for the time being dominant in the State. In 1828 Maryland was the only State which clung to district voting. She, too, adopted the "general ticket" system in 1832, since which year it has been universal. Thus the issue comes directly before the people. The parties nominate their respective candidates, in manner to be hereinafter described, a tremendous "campaign" of stump speaking, newspaper writing, street parades, and torchlight processions sets in and rages for about four months: the polling for electors takes place early in November, on the same day over the whole Union, and when the result is known the contest is over, because the subsequent meeting and voting of the electors in their several States is mere matter of form.

1

So far the method of choice by electors may seem to be merely a roundabout way of getting the judgment of the people. It is more than this. It has several singular consequences, unforeseen by the framers of the Constitution. It has made the election virtually an election by States, for the present system of choosing electors by "general ticket" over the whole State causes the whole weight of a State to be thrown into the scale of one candidate, that candidate whose list of electors is carried in the given State. Pennsylvania, for instance, with her population of four and a half millions, has thirty electoral votes. Each party runs its list or "ticket" of thirty presidential electors for that State, who are bound to vote for the party's candidate, let us say Mr. Blaine or Mr. Cleveland. The Republican list (i.e. that which includes the thirty Blaine electors) is carried by a majority of 473,000 against 392,000. It is carried entire, if carried at all, because it would be foolish for any partisans of Mr. Blaine to vote for some only and not for all of the electors whose only function is to vote for him.2 Thus, all the thirty electoral votes of Pennsylvania are secured for Mr. Blaine. The hundreds of thousands of votes given by the people for the Democratic list do not go to swell the support which Mr. Cleveland obtains in other States, but are utterly lost. Hence in a presidential election, the struggle concentrates itself in the doubtful States, where the great parties are pretty equally divided, and is languid in States where a distinct majority either

1 See the chapter on National Nominating Conventions in Vol. II.

2 However the electors on a ticket seldom receive exactly the same number of popular votes and in California in 1880 one out of the six electors in the Democratic ticket, being personally unpopular, failed to be carried, though the other five were.

way may be anticipated, because, since it makes no difference whether a minority be large or small, it is not worth while to struggle hard to increase a minority which cannot be turned into a majority. And hence also a man may be, and has been,1 elected President by a minority of popular votes.

When such has been the fate of the plan of 1787, it need hardly be said that the ideal President, the great and good man above and outside party, whom the judicious and impartial electors were to choose, has not been secured. The ideal was realized once and once only in the person of George Washington. His successor in the chair (John Adams) was a leader of one of the two great parties then formed, the other of which has, with some changes, lasted down to our own time. Jefferson, who came next, was the chief of that other party, and his election marked its triumph. Nearly every subsequent President has been elected as a party leader by a party vote, and has felt bound to carry out the policy of the men who put him in power.2 Thus instead of getting an Olympian President raised above faction, America has, despite herself, reproduced the English system of executive government by a party majority, reproduced it in a more extreme form, because in England the titular head of

1 This happened in 1876, when Mr. Hayes received, on the showing of his own partisans, only 4,033,708 popular votes, against 4,285,992 given for Mr. Tilden; and in 1888, when Mr. Harrison was 95,000 popular votes behind Mr. Cleveland. In 1880 Mr. Garfield was elected by 214 against 155 electoral votes, but had a popular majority of only 4,454,146 against 4,444,952, out of the whole Union. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln received much less than half the total popular vote, but had an electoral majority among the presidential electors of 180 against 123 voting for his various rivals. So neither Polk in 1844, nor Taylor in 1848, nor Buchanan in 1856, had an absolute majority of the popular vote. In 1884 the whole thirty-six votes of New York State were cast for Mr. Cleveland, although his popular majority in that State, out of a poll of more than 1,100,000, was just over 1100. And as these thirty-six votes turned the election, it was a majority of only 1100 that determined the issue of the struggle over the whole Union, in which nearly 10,000,000 votes were given.

It is an odd result of the system that the bestowal of the suffrage on the negroes has operated against the Republican party which bestowed it. The Southern States have in respect of this increase in their voting population received 37 additional presidential votes, and these have in the three last elections (1880, 1884, 1888) been all thrown for the Democratic candidate.

2 John Tyler and Andrew Johnson, both of whom quarrelled with their party, were both elected as Vice-Presidents, and succeeded to the chair on the death of the persons who had been elected Presidents. James Monroe was chosen President in 1820 with practical unanimity; but this was because one of the two parties had for the time been crushed out and started no candidate. Adams, Monroe's successor, can hardly be called a party leader. party-chosen Presidents go on without interruption.

So also J. Q. After him the