In two respects the President is more important as compared with the representatives of the people, even in times of peace, than the king of England or the President of France. Firstly, his cabinet is entirely independent of the voice of parliament, and it has often been the case that while a majority in Congress sharply opposed the party policy of the President, this has not influenced the composition of his cabinet. The cabinet ministers are the representatives of the presidential policy, and they do not even take part in the doings of Congress.
Secondly, the President is not less but rather more than Congress a representative of the people. A monarch who takes up a position against the parliament thereby antagonizes the people. The President of France is elected by the people, but only through their parliamentary representatives; the chambers elect him, and therefore he is not an independent authority. The President of the United States, on the other hand, is in his own person a symbol of the collective will of the people, as opposed to the different members of Congress, which is of diverse composition and chosen on more local issues. There is moral authority, therefore, vested in the President. He is the true will of the people and his veto is their conscience. It is almost astonishing that a Republican democracy should have put such tremendous power into the hands of a single man. It is the more striking inasmuch as the Declaration of Independence related at length the sins of the English monarch. But we must bear in mind that the framers of the Constitution had to make a new and dangerous experiment, wherein they were much more afraid of that so far unknown and incalculable factor, the rule of the people, than the power of that single person whose administrative possibilities they had, in the colonial days, been able to observe in the governors of the several states. These had been diminutive but, on the whole, encouraging examples. Before all else the great and incomparable George Washington, the popular, dashing, and yet cautious aristocrat, had presided at the deliberations in which the Constitution was discussed, and had himself stood tangibly before the popular mind as the very ideal of a president.