But the Presidential system not only gives the executive power an antagonist in the legislative power, and so makes it weaker; it also enfeebles it by impairing its intrinsic quality.  A Cabinet is elected by a legislature; and when that legislature is composed of fit persons, that mode of electing the executive is the very best.  It is a case of secondary election, under the only conditions in which secondary election is preferable to primary.  Generally speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce.  The Electoral College of America is so.  It was intended that the deputies when assembled should exercise a real discretion, and by independent choice select the President.  But the primary electors take too much interest.  They only elect a deputy to vote for Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Breckenridge, and the deputy only takes a ticket, and drops that ticket in an urn.  He never chooses or thinks of choosing.  He is but a messenger—­a transmitter; the real decision is in those who choose him—­who chose him because they knew what he would do.  It is true that the British House of Commons is subject to the same influences.  Members are mostly, perhaps, elected because they will vote for a particular Ministry, rather than for purely legislative reasons.  But—­and here is the capital distinction—­the functions of the House of Commons are important and continuous.  It does not, like the Electoral College in the United States, separate when it has elected its ruler; it watches, legislates, seats and unseats ministries, from day to day.  Accordingly it is a real electoral body.  The Parliament of 1857, which, more than any other Parliament of late years, was a Parliament elected to support a particular premier—­which was chosen, as Americans might say, upon the “Palmerston ticket”—­before it had been in existence two years, dethroned Lord Palmerston.  Though selected in the interest of a particular Ministry, it in fact destroyed that Ministry.  A good Parliament, too, is a capital choosing body.  If it is fit to make laws for a country, its majority ought to represent the general average intelligence of that country; its various members ought to represent the various special interests, special opinions, special prejudices, to be found in that community.  There ought to be an advocate for every particular sect, and a vast neutral body of no sect—­homogeneous and judicial, like the nation itself.  Such a body, when possible, is the best selector of executives that can be imagined.  It is full of political activity; it is close to political life; it feels the responsibility of affairs which are brought as it were to its threshold; it has as much intelligence as the society in question chances to contain.  It is, what Washington and Hamilton strove to create, an electoral college of the picked men of the nation.  The best mode of