rejudices, 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 appreciating its advantages is to look at the alternative. The
competing constituency is the nation itself, and this is, according to
theory and experience, in all but the rarest cases, a bad constituency.
Mr. Lincoln, at his second election, being elected when all the Federal
States had set their united hearts on one single object, was
voluntarily reelected by an actually choosing nation. He embodied the
object in which every one was absorbed. But this is almost the only
Presidential election of which so much can be said. In almost all cases
the President is chosen by a machinery of caucuses and combinations too
complicated to be perfectly known, and too familiar to require
description. He is not the choice of the nation, he is the choice of
the wire-pullers. A very large constituency in quiet times is the
necessary, almost the legitimate, subject of electioneering management:
a man cannot know that he does not throw his vote away except he votes
as part of some great organisation; and if he votes as a part, he
abdicates his electoral function in favour of the managers of that
association. The nation, even if it chose for itself, would, in some
degree, be an unskilled body; but when it does not choose for itself,
but only as latent agitators wish, it is like a large, lazy man, with a
small vicious mind,--it moves slowly and heavily, but it moves at the
bidding of a bad intention; it "means LITTLE, but it means that little
ILL."

And, as the nation is less able to choose than a Parliament, so it has
worse people to choose out of. The American legislators of the last
century have been much blamed for not permitting the Ministers of the
President to be members of the assembly; but, with reference to the
specific end which they had in view, they saw clearly and decided
wisely. They wished to keep "the legislative