serted at length also as confirming the proposition which it is the chief object of this work to prove, that the real evil is not in universal suffrage but in the organization of government and that it is to be met by the establishment of a strong and independent executive power, held responsible to public opinion. We have now to examine how the executive power in France, which through so large a part of this century has been nearly or quite an irresponsible despotism, has under the Third Republic been brought so completely under the domination of the legislature.

CHAPTER XV

FRANCE-THE THIRD REPUBLIC (Continued)

IN considering the position and working of executive power in government the first element of importance is the mode of its constitution, and this is perhaps the question which in the short experience of popular government has received the least definite and satisfactory solution. Whether the executive branch shall consist of a number of persons, as in the British ministry and the Swiss Federal Council, or of a single president, and if the latter whether he should be elected by the legislature or the people, are problems which are certainly open to discussion. As regards France, the subject is taken up by the Duc de Broglie, in an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes for April 15, 1894, upon the constitution of 1875.

I am aware that it is the fashion to say to-day that political institutions are in themselves neither good nor bad and take their value only from the manner in which they are applied. It is certain that no institution has in itself sufficient merit to dispense with wisdom and skill in those who put it in operation, but on the other hand may there not be such as are so badly contrived that no art or prudence can correct their vices?

Elected by the Assembly, said the partisans of universal suffrage in the debates of 1848, the President will be only its servant and its agent. He will be lost in it and depend upon the caprices of its will. The executive power will then be under the yoke of the legislative power, and in this mixture of the two powers all real liberty will disappear. There is no longer liberty or safety, they added, when it is the same power which makes the laws and is intrusted with carrying them out. Instead of making laws with a view to the general advantage, and upon considerations of some permanence, they are made or

revoked with an eye to private gain. They are made when they are convenient and revoked when they are troublesome.

Elected by the people, replied the defenders of the Assembly, the President will hold his power from the same source as the Assembly itself; he will be able to call himself as much as the Assembly the representative of the popular will, with this difference, that while in the Assembly the national representation is scattered and broken up, it will rest concentrated upon the head of the President with all the force of unity. Who will be sufficient to resist this double influence of the material force of power and the moral force of election? Who will be able to resist the representative of several millions of men marching at the head of five hundred thousand soldiers? In the plan of a constitution, still-born, presented by M. Dufaure in the name of M. Thiers just before their common fall, this electoral system is mentioned only with the contemptuous qualification, "This mode already tried has not left a memory which recommends it."

But even the most painful memories are quickly effaced in France, especially when a past evil, which seems only a dream, is replaced by a present evil which seems worse. The extreme weakness of executive power of which we are to-day witnesses and of which I shall have presently to explain the causes, the spectacle of a parliament of which the encroachments absorb, confiscate, and annul every other authority except its own, have already given birth anew in more than one mind to regret at no longer seeing at the head of the State, instead of an impotent shadow, a chief whose arm would be furnished with real authority by a brilliant testimony of the national confidence. The election of a president by universal suffrage is a theme taken up again in the press by many distinguished minds, and if their isolated voices do not yet find an echo it would need only an incident easy to foresee, a too marked collapse of the existing system, to bring it back to unexpected honor.

Speaking of the affair of General Boulanger, M. de Broglie says:

A recent experiment has shown us only too clearly what an attraction, as imperious as unreflecting, often leads France to embody the idea of authority in a man whose name, taking possession of all imaginations, flies from mouth to mouth and fixes all eyes upon himself.

Is not that the tendency of all peoples, and only stronger in the French because they have been taught so little of self-government ? 1

1 It was during the weakness of Louis Philippe's government that the outbreak of enthusiasm for the memory of the first Napoleon paved the

In good faith it cannot be denied that the choice of the people is, with regard to the election of the President as of every other public man, essentially the republican and the democratic method. Every republican constitution is placed upon the incline which leads to this. That has been the fate of the Federal Constitution of the United States, though its authors tried to protect themselves from that fate by intrusting the decisive vote to delegates named by special appointment. Everybody knows that to-day this precaution has become in practice illusory, and that each delegate arrives as the bearer of a ballot written in advance, under the direction of universal suffrage. Thus national instinct, republican logic, a grand and specious example, everything might concur from one hour to another to bring us to the test of a plebiscitary election of a president.

After admitting that the events of 1870 have destroyed all chance of a fresh Bonapartist usurpation, M. de Broglie continues:

But all the dangers of such an election would not consist in the chance of a dictatorship. Even legally and to a certain extent loyally applied to France, it would mean practically a system of permanent official candidacy, ruling from one end of the country to the other, and set at work by the chief of the State himself to insure the renewal of his power, if he were reëligible, or the election of a successor whom, in the interest of his party, he might have selected to replace himself. No more powerful instrument could be imagined to establish the absolute dominion of one fraction of the nation over the other. This is the result which intelligent observers in America have pointed to as in a picture, the fidelity of which is not disputed. But it must be remarked that to exercise this action (which to the Americans themselves, although habituated to it, begins to seem excessive), the President of the United States disposes only of a small number of servants, scattered over a territory two or three times as large as that of Europe; that in this immense space he must encounter the resistance of thirty or forty states, having each an independent organization; that to secure obedience he has under his orders only a small army thirty thousand men; that he is everywhere watched by a magistracy, which, so far from depending upon him, escapes him in its lower

of

way for the Second Empire. It is significant that at the present time (1896) there is a fresh revival of ardent interest in all the memoirs and events of the earlier time. A strong civil ruler, holding power for half a generation and leading the Republic to orderly and peaceful success, might divert the influence of the baneful meteor which for a century has been such a curse to France.

ranks by election, and overtops him in the higher by a supreme tribunal to which he is amenable. Then compare the feeble weight of this authority with the colossus of French administration, of which the thousand feet rest and the hundred arms act at once on all the points of the contracted soil which bears its crushing weight.

These are the arguments against a popularly elected president. Those in favor we shall have to consider in treating of the United States. It may be observed, however, that the safeguard is in the presence and public responsibility of his ministers in the face of an independent and vigilant legislature. We will now examine how far these arguments are offset by those against a president elected by an assembly. The Duc de Broglie quite approves of the rejection of the plan of electing a president by universal suffrage. But he finds himself confronted with that other alternative rejected by the Assembly of 1848. How could it be managed that if elected by the Parliament the chief of the State should be anything but its agent and obedient servant? How could there be contrived for him an existence independent of the authority from which he emanated?

Some means of doing this must be found, however, under penalty of arriving by an indirect but not very long road at the annihilation of executive power under parliamentary omnipotence. Now the separation of the two powers is such an elementary principle of modern public law-respect for which is so generally recognized as essential both to public order and individual liberty that although it has been several times violated during our revolutionary crises, I think no party would propose to establish as normal and regular a system which ignores or only compromises it.

M. de Broglie then shows that the constitution of 1875, unlike that of 1848, is not explained by any light of discussion. With a departure from the usual French practice, there is no enunciation whatever of abstract principle, but only the most naked practical detail.