51 I quote from an excellent handbook, The United States Government, by Lamphere.
52 "In America the President cannot prevent any law from being passed, nor can he evade the obligation of enforcing it His sincere and zealous coöperation is no doubt useful, but it is not indispensable, in the carrying on of public affairs. All his important acts are directly or indirectly submitted to the legislature, and of his own free authority he can do but little. It is, therefore, his weakness, and not his power, which enables him to remain in opposition to Congress. In Europe, harmony must reign between the Crown and the other branches of the legislature, because a collision between them may prove serious; in America, this harmony is not indispensable, because such a collision is impossible."—De Tocqueville, i. p. 124.
53 Westminster Review, vol. lxvi., p. 193.
54 Tenure of Office Act, already discussed.
55 These "ifs" are abundantly supported by the executive acts of the war-time. The Constitution had then to stand aside that President Lincoln might be as prompt as the seeming necessities of the time.
56 Central Government (Eng. Citizen Series), II. D. Traill, p. 20.
57 Professor Sumner's Andrew Jackson (American Statesmen Series), p. 226. "Finally," adds Prof. S., "the methods and machinery of democratic republican self-government—caucuses, primaries, committees, and conventions—lend themselves perhaps more easily than any other methods and machinery to the uses of selfish cliques which seek political influence for interested purposes."
58 Bagehot: Essay on Sir Robert Peel, p. 24.
59 H. C. Lodge's Alexander Hamilton (Am. Statesmen Series), pp. 60, 61.
60 Bagehot, Eng. Const., p. 293.
61 Bagehot, Eng. Const., p. 296.
62 Green: Hist. of the English People (Harpers' ed.), iv., pp 58, 59.
63 Statesman's Manual, i. p. 244.
64 Mr. Dale, of Birmingham.
George Washington
Chapter II A Virginian Breeding
Chapter III Colonel Washington
Chapter V The Heat of Politics
Chapter VI Piloting a Revolution
Chapter VII General Washington
Chapter VIII The Stress of Victory
Chapter X The First President of the United States
Chapter I
In Washington's Day
George Washington was bred a gentleman and a man of honor in the free school of Virginian society, with the generation that first learned what it meant to maintain English communities in America in safety and a self-respecting independence. He was born in a season of quiet peace, when the plot of colonial history was thickening noiselessly and almost without observation. He came to his first manhood upon the first stir of revolutionary events; caught in their movement, he served a rough apprenticeship in arms at the thick of the French and Indian war; the Revolution found him a leader and veteran in affairs at forty-four; every turn of fortune confirmed him in his executive habit of foresight and mastery; death spared him, stalwart and commanding, until, his rising career rounded and complete, no man doubted him the first character of his age. "Virginia gave us this imperial man," and with him a companion race of statesmen and masters in affairs. It was her natural gift, the times and her character being what they were; and Washington's life showed the whole process of breeding by which she conceived so great a generosity in manliness and public spirit.
The English colonies in America lay very tranquil in 1732, the year in which Washington was born. It fell in a season between times, when affairs lingered, as if awaiting a change. The difficulties and anxieties of first settlement were long ago past and done with in all the principal colonies. They had been hardening to their "wilderness work," some of them, these hundred years and more. England could now reckon quite six hundred thousand subjects upon the long Atlantic seaboard of the great continent which had lain remote and undiscovered through so many busy ages, until daring sailors hit upon it at last amidst the stir of the adventurous fifteenth century; and there was no longer any thought that her colonists would draw back or falter in what they had undertaken. They had grown sedate even and self-poised, with somewhat of the air of old communities, as they extended their settlements upon the coasts and rivers and elaborated their means of self-government amidst the still forests, and each had already a bearing and character of its own. 'Twas easy to distinguish the New-Englander from the man of the southern colonies; and the busy middle provinces that stretched back from the great bay at New-York and from the waters of the spreading Delaware had also a breed of their own, like neither the men of the south nor the men of the northeast. Each region had bred for itself its characteristic communities, holding their own distinctive standards, knowing their own special purposes, living their own lives with a certain separateness and independence.
Virginia, the oldest of the colonies, was least to be distinguished by any private character of her own from the rural communities of England herself. Her population had come to her almost without selection throughout every stage of quick change and troubled fortune that England had seen during the fateful days since James Stuart became king; and Englishmen in Virginia were in no way radically distinguishable from Englishmen in England, except that they were provincials and frontiersmen. They