This was the question which was met and answered only after long debates, and with infinite difficulty, by the American Constitutional Convention of 1787. It is more than probable that this convention could never have been held without the influence and the presence of George Washington, who presided over its deliberations; and it is as certain as anything human can be, that the constitution which it framed would never have been accepted by the people of the States if they had not known that the executive office created by it would be filled by him.
The political safeguards put about the American Executive by the constitution may or may not always resist such a strain as has already more than once been put upon them. The seceding States, in their constitution adopted at Montgomery in 1861, tried to strengthen these safeguards by extending the presidential term to six years, and making the President re-eligible only after an interval of six years more. But all our national experience goes to show that the more difficult it is for a mere majority of the people to make or unmake the authority which sets a final sanction upon the execution of the laws, the greater will be the safety of the public liberty and of private rights.
So true is this that every American who witnessed, at London in 1887, the Jubilee of the Queen, felt, and was glad to feel, with a natural and instinctive sympathy, the honest contagion of that magnificent outburst of the loyalty of a great and free people to the hereditary representative of their historic liberties and of their historic law. I am sure that no intelligent Englishman can have witnessed the tremendous outpouring of the American people into New York on April 30, 1889, to do honour there to the hundredth anniversary of the first inauguration of George Washington, without a kindred emotion.
To compare with the significance of either of these scenes that of the gigantic cosmopolitan fair dedicated at Paris in 1889 by President Carnot to the 'principles of 1789' is to exhaust the resources of the ridiculous.
The antagonism which now exists between France and the Third Republic certainly did not exist between France and the ancient monarchy. The members of the États-Généraux of 1789, who were so soon permitted, by the incapacity of Louis XVI., to resolve that body into the chaotic mob which assumed the name of a National Assembly, were elected, not at all to change the fabric of the French Government, but simply to reform, in concert with the king, abuses, two-thirds of which were virtually defunct when the king took off his hat to the Three Orders at Versailles on the 5th of May, 1789, and the rest of which took a new lease of life, often under new names, from the follies and the crimes of the First Republic, after the 22nd of September, 1792. Two contemporary observers, watching the drama from very different points of view, Arthur Young and Gouverneur Morris, long ago discerned this. M. Henri Taine, and the group of conscientious historical students who, during the last quarter of a century, have been reconstructing the annals of the revolutionary period, have put it beyond all doubt. The enormous majority of the French people, and even of the people of Paris, were so little infatuated with the 'principles of 1789' that they regarded the advent to power of the first Napoleon with inexpressible relief, as making an end of what Arthur Young calls, and not too sternly, a series of constitutions 'formed by conventions of rabble and sanctioned by the _sans-culottes_ of the kennel.' Without fully understanding this, it is impossible to understand either the history of the Napoleons, or the present antagonism between France and the Third Republic.