While this may lead, as it has in recent years, to temporary and regrettable embarrassments, yet in the long run, it is not only better for the United States, but it is even to the best interests of other nations, for in this way they are safeguarded against the possible action of an Executive with whom racial instincts might still be very influential.  In your country, where the Government of the day is subject to immediate dismissal for want of confidence, such power over foreign relations can be safely entrusted to a few men, but in the United States, with its fixed tenures of office, a President could pledge the faith and involve his nation in war against the interests and will of the people.  Suppose the President had unlimited power over our foreign relations and that within the next ten years an American, whose parents were born in any European nation, was elected on purely domestic issues, he could, with his assured four years of power, bring about a new alignment of nations and shake the political equilibrium of the world.  The Constitution wisely refused to grant such a power.  Hence the provision for the concurrence of the legislative representatives of the nation.  At all events, it constitutes a system which, as the last presidential election showed, the American people will not willingly forgo.  It is true that this system makes it difficult for the United States to participate effectively in the main purpose of the League of Nations to enforce peace by joint action at Geneva, but to ask the United States to surrender a vital part of its constitutional system, upon which its domestic peace so largely depends, in order to promote the League, seems to me as unreasonable as it would be to ask your country to abolish the Crown, to which it is sincerely attached as a vital part of its system, as a contribution towards international co-operation.  You would not surrender such an integral part of your system, and therefore it is not reasonable to expect a similar sacrifice on our part, even though the meritorious purposes of the League be freely recognized.

I have thus summarized briefly and most inadequately some of the essential principles of the Constitution.  I have only been able to suggest very impressionistically what they are and the lessons to be drawn from them.  If I were able to deliver a dozen addresses on the subject in this historic Hall and with this indulgent audience I would not scratch even the surface.  To understand the Constitution of the United States you must not only read the text but the thousands of opinions rendered in the last 130 years by the Supreme Court in its great task of interpreting this wonderful document.  Few documents have been the subject of more extended commentaries.  The four thousand words have been meticulously examined through intellectual microscopes in judicial opinions, textbooks, and other commentaries which are as “thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa.”