The efficient secret of the English constitution is the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers.  The connecting link is the cabinet.  This is a committee of the legislative body, in choosing which indirectly but not directly the legislature is nearly omnipotent.  The prime minister is chosen by the House of Commons, and is the head of the efficient part of the constitution.  The queen is only at the head of its dignified part.  The Prime Minister himself has to choose his associates, but can only do so out of a charmed circle.

The cabinet is an absolutely secret committee, which can dissolve the assembly which appointed it.  It is an executive which is at once the nominee of the legislature, and can annihilate the legislature.  The system stands in precise contrast to the presidential system, in which the legislative and executive powers are entirely independent.

A good parliament is a capital choosing body; it is an electoral college of the picked men of the nation.  But in the American system the president is chosen by a complicated machinery of caucuses; he is not the choice of the nation, but of the wirepullers.  The members of congress are excluded from executive office, and the separation makes neither the executive half nor the legislative half of political life worth having.  Hence it is only men of an inferior type who are attracted to political life at all.

Again our system enables us to change our ruler suddenly on an emergency.  Thus we could abolish the Aberdeen Cabinet, which was in itself eminently adapted for every sort of difficulty save the one it had to meet, but wanted the daemonic element, and substitute a statesman who had the precise sort of merit wanted at the moment.  But under a presidential government you can do nothing of the kind.  There is no elastic element; everything is rigid, specified, dated.  You have bespoken your government for the time, and you must keep it.  Moreover, under the English system all the leading statesmen are known quantities.  But in America a new president before his election is usually an unknown quantity.

Cabinet government demands the mutual confidence of the electors, a calm national mind, and what I may call rationality—­a power involving intelligence, yet distinct from it.  It demands also a competent legislature, which is a rarity.  In the early stages of human society the grand object is not to make new laws, but to prevent innovation.  Custom is the first check on tyranny, but at the present day the desire is to adapt the law to changed conditions.  In the past, however, continuous legislatures were rare because they were not wanted.  Now you have to get a good legislature and to keep it good.  To keep it good it must have a sufficient supply of business.  To get it good is a precedent difficulty.  A nation in which the mass of the people are intelligent, educated, and comfortable can elect a good parliament.  Or what I will call a deferential nation may do so—­I mean one in which the numerical majority wishes to be ruled by the wiser minority.