of Government is a great result.  It has a hundred ramifications; it runs through society; it gives hope to many, and it takes away hope from many.  It is one of those marked events which, by its magnitude and its melodrama, impress men even too much.  And debates which have this catastrophe at the end of them—­or may so have it—­are sure to be listened to, and sure to sink deep into the national mind.  Travellers even in the Northern States of America, the greatest and best of Presidential countries, have noticed that the nation was “not specially addicted to politics”; that they have not a public opinion finished and chastened as that of the English has been finished and chastened.  A great many hasty writers have charged this defect on the “Yankee race,” on the Anglo-American character; but English people, if they had no motive to attend to politics, certainly would not attend to politics.  At present there is business in their attention.  They assist at the determining crisis; they arrest or help it.  Whether the Government will go out or remain is determined by the debate, and by the division in Parliament.  And the opinion out of doors, the secret pervading disposition of society, has a great influence on that division.  The nation feels that its judgment is important, and it strives to judge.  It succeeds in deciding because the debates and the discussions give it the facts and the arguments.  But under a Presidential government, a nation has, except 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.  It is not incited to form an opinion like a nation under a Cabinet government; nor is it instructed like such a nation.  There are doubtless debates in the legislature, but they are prologues without a play.  There is nothing of a catastrophe about them; you can not turn out the Government.  The prize of power is not in the gift of the legislature, and no one cares for the legislature.  The executive, the great centre of power and place, sticks irremovable; you cannot change it in any event.  The teaching apparatus which has educated our public mind, which prepares our resolutions, which shapes our opinions, does not exist.  No Presidential country needs to form daily delicate opinions, or is helped in forming them.  It might be thought that the discussions in the press would supply the deficiencies in the Constitution; that by a reading people especially, the conduct of their Government would be as carefully watched, that their opinions about it would be as consistent, as accurate, as well considered, under a Presidential as under a Cabinet polity.  But the same difficulty oppresses the press which oppresses the legislature.  It can do nothing.  It cannot change the administration; the executive was elected for such and such years, and for such and such years it must last.  People wonder that so literary a people as the Americans—­a