ting
barriers which democracy has found it more difficult to overcome. For
more than a century the constitutional bulwarks which they raised
against the rule of the numerical majority have obstructed and retarded
the progress of the democratic movement. The force of public sentiment
soon compelled, it is true, the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, which
in effect recognized the existence of political parties and made
provision for the party candidate for President and Vice-President. At
most, however, it merely allowed the party to name the executive
without giving it any effective control over him after he was elected,
since in other respects the general plan of the Constitution remained
unchanged.

The political party, it is true, has come to play an important role
under our constitutional system; but its power and influence are of a
negative rather than a positive character. It professes, of course, to
stand for the principle of majority rule, but in practice it has become
an additional and one of the most potent checks on the majority.

To understand the peculiar features of the American party system one
must bear in mind the constitutional arrangements under which it has
developed. The party is simply a voluntary political association through
which the people seek to formulate the policy of the government, select
the officials who are to carry it out in the actual administration of
public affairs, and hold them to strict accountability for so doing.
Under any government which makes full provision for the political party,
as in the English system of to-day, the party has not only the power to
elect but the power to remove those who are entrusted with the execution
of its policies. Having this complete control of the government, it can
not escape responsibility for failure to carry out the promises by which
it secured a majority at the polls. This is the essential difference
between the English system on the one hand and the party under the
American constitutional system on the other. The one well knows that if
it carries the election it will be expected to make its promises good.
The other makes certain promises with the knowledge that after the
election is over it will probably have no power to carry them out.

It is this lack of power to shape the entire policy of the government
which, more than anything else, has given form and character to the
party system of the United States. To the extent that the Constitu