quick crisis, the time when a sovereign power is most needed,
you cannot FIND the supreme people. You have got a Congress elected for
one fixed period, going out perhaps by fixed instalments, which cannot
be accelerated or retarded--you have a President chosen for a fixed
period, and immovable during that period: all the arrangements are for
STATED times. There is no ELASTIC element, everything is rigid,
specified, dated. Come what may, you can quicken nothing, and can
retard nothing. You have bespoken your Government in advance, and
whether it suits you or not, whether it works well or works ill,
whether it is what you want or not, by law you must keep it. In a
country of complex foreign relations it would mostly happen that the
first and most critical year of every war would be managed by a peace
Premier, and the first and most critical years of peace by a war
Premier. In each case the period of transition would be irrevocably
governed by a man selected not for what he was to introduce, but what
he was to change--for the policy he was to abandon, not for the policy
he was to administer.

The whole history of the American Civil War--a history which has thrown
an intense light on the working of a Presidential government at the
time when government is most important--is but a vast continuous
commentary on these reflections. It would, indeed, be absurd to press
against Presidential government AS SUCH the singular defect by which
Vice-President Johnson has become President--by which a man elected to
a sinecure is fixed in what is for the moment the most important
administrative part in the political world. This defect, though most
characteristic of the expectations[4] of the framers of the
Constitution and of its working, is but an accident of this particular
case of Presidential government, and no necessary ingredient in that
government itself. But the first election of Mr. Lincoln is liable to
no such objection. It was a characteristic instance of the natural
working of such a government upon a great occasion. And what was that
working? It may be summed up--it was government by an UNKNOWN QUANTITY.
Hardly any one in America had any living idea what Mr. Lincoln was
like, or any definite notion what he would do. The leading statesmen
under the system of Cabinet government are not only household words,
but household IDEAS. A conception, not, perhaps, in all respects a true
but a most vivid conception of what Mr. Gladstone i