appreciating its advantages is to look at the alternative.  The competing constituency is the nation itself, and this is, according to theory and experience, in all but the rarest cases, a bad constituency.  Mr. Lincoln, at his second election, being elected when all the Federal States had set their united hearts on one single object, was voluntarily reelected by an actually choosing nation.  He embodied the object in which every one was absorbed.  But this is almost the only Presidential election of which so much can be said.  In almost all cases the President is chosen by a machinery of caucuses and combinations too complicated to be perfectly known, and too familiar to require description.  He is not the choice of the nation, he is the choice of the wire-pullers.  A very large constituency in quiet times is the necessary, almost the legitimate, subject of electioneering management:  a man cannot know that he does not throw his vote away except he votes as part of some great organisation; and if he votes as a part, he abdicates his electoral function in favour of the managers of that association.  The nation, even if it chose for itself, would, in some degree, be an unskilled body; but when it does not choose for itself, but only as latent agitators wish, it is like a large, lazy man, with a small vicious mind,—­it moves slowly and heavily, but it moves at the bidding of a bad intention; it “means little, but it means that little ill.”

And, as the nation is less able to choose than a Parliament, so it has worse people to choose out of.  The American legislators of the last century have been much blamed for not permitting the Ministers of the President to be members of the assembly; but, with reference to the specific end which they had in view, they saw clearly and decided wisely.  They wished to keep “the legislative branch absolutely distinct from the executive branch”; they believed such a separation to be essential to a good constitution; they believed such a separation to exist in the English, which the wisest of them thought the best Constitution.  And, to the effectual maintenance of such a separation, the exclusion of the President’s Ministers from the legislature is essential.  If they are not excluded they become the executive, they eclipse the President himself.  A legislative chamber is greedy and covetous; it acquires as much, it concedes as little as possible.  The passions of its members are its rulers; the law-making faculty, the most comprehensive of the imperial faculties, is its instrument; it will take the administration if it can take it.  Tried by their own aims, the founders of the United States were wise in excluding the Ministers from Congress.