s own sphere, all alike owed
allegiance to the king as visible head of the empire. To people who had
been in the habit of setting forth and defending such a theory, it was
impossible that the crown should seem so much a legal fiction as it had
really come to be in England. It is very instructive to note that while
the members of the Federal Convention thoroughly understood the
antiquated theory of the English Constitution as set forth by
Blackstone, they drew very few illustrations from the modern working of
Parliament, with which they had not had sufficient opportunities of
becoming familiar. In particular they seemed quite unconscious of the
vast significance of a dissolution of Parliament, although a dissolution
had occurred only three years before under such circumstances as to work
a revolution in British politics without a breath of disturbance. The
only sort of dissolution with which they were familiar was that in which
Dunmore or Bernard used to send the colonial assemblies home about their
business whenever they grew too refractory. Had the significance of a
dissolution, in the British sense, been understood by the convention,
the pregnant suggestion of Roger Sherman, above mentioned, could not
have failed to give a different turn to the whole series of debates on
the executive branch of the government. Had our Constitution been framed
a few years later, this point would have had a better chance of being
understood. As it was, in trying to modify the English system so as to
adapt it to our own uses, it was the archaic monarchical feature, and
not the modern ministerial feature, upon which we seized. The president,
in our system, irremovable by the national legislature, does not answer
to the modern prime minister, but to the old-fashioned king, with powers
for mischief curtailed by election for short terms.

[Sidenote: The American cabinet is analogous not to the British cabinet,
but to the privy council.]

The close parallelism between the office of president and that of king
in the minds of the framers of the Constitution was instructively shown
in the debates on the advisableness of restraining the president's
action by a privy council. Gerry and Sherman urged that there was need
of such a council, in order to keep watch over the president. It was
suggested that the privy council should consist of "the president of the
Senate, the speaker of the House of Representatives, the chief justice
of the supreme cou