Liberalism is sometimes suspected of being cold to these new hopes, and you may often hear it said that Liberalism is already superseded by Socialism.  That a change is passing over party names in Europe is plain, but you may be sure that no change in name will extinguish these principles of society which are rooted in the nature of things, and are accredited by their success.  Twice America has saved liberalism in Great Britain.  The War for Independence in the eighteenth century was the defeat of usurping power no less in England than here.  The War for Union in the nineteenth century gave the decisive impulse to a critical extension of suffrage, and an era of popular reform in the mother country.  Any miscarriage of democracy here reacts against progress in Great Britain.

If you seek the real meaning of most modern disparagement of popular or parliamentary government, it is no more than this, that no politics will suffice of themselves to make a nation’s soul.  What could be more true?  Who says it will?  But we may depend upon it that the soul will be best kept alive in a nation where there is the highest proportion of those who, in the phrase of an old worthy of the seventeenth century, think it a part of a man’s religion to see to it that his country be well governed.

Democracy, they tell us, is afflicted by mediocrity and by sterility.  But has not democracy in my country, as in yours, shown before now that it well knows how to choose rulers neither mediocre nor sterile; men more than the equals in unselfishness, in rectitude, in clear sight, in force, of any absolutist statesman, that ever in times past bore the scepter?  If I live a few months, or it may be even a few weeks longer, I hope to have seen something of three elections—­one in Canada, one in the United Kingdom, and the other here.  With us, in respect of leadership, and apart from height of social prestige, the personage corresponding to the president is, as you know, the prime minister.  Our general election this time, owing to personal accident of the passing hour, may not determine quite exactly who shall be the prime minister, but it will determine the party from which the prime minister shall be taken.  On normal occasions our election of a prime minister is as direct and personal as yours, and in choosing a member of Parliament people were really for a whole generation choosing whether Disraeli or Gladstone or Salisbury should be head of the government.

The one central difference between your system and ours is that the American president is in for a fixed time, whereas the British prime minister depends upon the support of the House of Commons.  If he loses that, his power may not endure a twelvemonth; if on the other hand, he keeps it, he may hold office for a dozen years.  There are not many more interesting or important questions in political discussion than the question whether our cabinet government or your presidential system of government is the better.  This is not the place to argue it.