at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.  There are doubtless debates in the legislature, but they are prologues without a play.  The prize of power is not in the gift of the legislature.  No presidential country needs to form daily delicate opinions, or is helped in forming them.”

Then when the people do go to the ballot-box, they cannot intelligently influence the policy of the government.  If they vote for a president, then congress may have a policy quite different from his; if they vote for members of congress, they cannot change the opinions of the president.  If the president changes his cabinet at any time, they have nothing to say about it, for its members are not important as wheels in the legislative machinery.  Congress may pass a bill of which the people express their disapproval at the first opportunity when they choose a new congress, but still it may remain on the statute-book because the senate holds views different from the newly elected House, and cannot be politically changed until after a long series of legislative elections.  As Professor Woodrow Wilson well puts it in an able essay:—­[31]

“Public opinion has no easy vehicle for its judgments, no quick channels for its action.  Nothing about the system is direct and simple.  Authority is perplexingly subdivided and distributed, and responsibility has to be hunted down in out-of-the-way corners.  So that the sum of the whole matter is that the means of working for the fruits of good government are not readily to be found.  The average citizen may be excused for esteeming government at best but a haphazard affair upon which his vote and all his influence can have but little effect.  How is his choice of representative in congress to affect the policy of the country as regards the questions in which he is most interested if the man for whom he votes has no chance of getting on the standing committee which has virtual charge of those questions?  How is it to make any difference who is chosen president?  Has the president any great authority in matters of vital policy?  It seems a thing of despair to get any assurance that any vote he may cast will even in an infinitesimal degree affect the essential courses of administration.  There are so many cooks mixing their ingredients in the national broth that it seems hopeless, this thing of changing one cook at a time.”

Under such a system it cannot be expected that the people will take the same deep interest in elections and feel as directly responsible for the character of the government as when they can at one election and by one verdict decide the fate of a government, whose policy on great issues must be thoroughly explained to them at the polls.  This method of popular government is more real and substantial than a system which does not allow the people to influence congressional legislation and administrative action through a set of men sitting in congress and having a common policy.