Constitution attained maturity, that we hardly appreciate this latent excellence.  We have not needed a Cavour to rule a revolution—­a representative man above all men fit for a great occasion, and by a natural legal mode brought in to rule.  But even in England, at what was the nearest to a great sudden crisis which we have had of late years—­at the Crimean difficulty—­we used this inherent power.  We abolished the Aberdeen Cabinet, the ablest we have had, perhaps, since the Reform Act—­a Cabinet not only adapted, but eminently adapted, for every sort of difficulty save the one it had to meet—­which abounded in pacific discretion, and was wanting only in the “daemonic element”; we chose a statesman, who had the sort of merit then wanted, who, when he feels the steady power of England behind him, will advance without reluctance, and will strike without restraint.  As was said at the time, “We turned out the Quaker, and put in the pugilist”.

But under a Presidential government you can do nothing of the kind.  The American Government calls itself a Government of the supreme people; but at a quick crisis, the time when a sovereign power is most needed, you cannot find the supreme people.  You have got a Congress elected for one fixed period, going out perhaps by fixed instalments, which cannot be accelerated or retarded—­you have a President chosen for a fixed period, and immovable during that period:  all the arrangements are for stated times.  There is no elastic element, everything is rigid, specified, dated.  Come what may, you can quicken nothing, and can retard nothing.  You have bespoken your Government in advance, and whether it suits you or not, whether it works well or works ill, whether it is what you want or not, by law you must keep it.  In a country of complex foreign relations it would mostly happen that the first and most critical year of every war would be managed by a peace Premier, and the first and most critical years of peace by a war Premier.  In each case the period of transition would be irrevocably governed by a man selected not for what he was to introduce, but what he was to change—­for the policy he was to abandon, not for the policy he was to administer.

The whole history of the American Civil War—­a history which has thrown an intense light on the working of a Presidential government at the time when government is most important—­is but a vast continuous commentary on these reflections.  It would, indeed, be absurd to press against Presidential government as such the singular defect by which Vice-President Johnson has become President—­by which a man elected to a sinecure is fixed in what is for the moment the most important administrative part in the political world.  This defect, though most characteristic of the expectations [Footnote:  The framers of the Constitution expected that the vice-president would be elected by the Electoral College as the second wisest man in the country.  The vice-presidentship