The intelligent note on page 51 of my third volume was written by Bourne, as I state in the note itself, but I did not speak of the large amount of study he gave to it. I never knew a man take keener interest in anything, and as we had all the necessary authorities at hand, he worked over them for two days, coming down on the morning of the third day with the triumphant air of one who had wrestled successfully with a mathematical problem all night. He sat down and, as I remember it, wrote the note substantially as it now stands in the volume. He was very strong on all economic and sociological questions, displaying in a marked degree the intellectual stimulus he had derived from his association with Professor Sumner. He was a born controversialist and liked to argue. “The appetite comes in eating” is a French saying, and with Bourne his knowledge seemed to be best evolved by the actual joint working and collision with another mind.
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I remember one felicitous suggestion of Bourne’s which after much working over we incorporated into a paragraph to our common satisfaction; and this paragraph received commendation in some critical notice. Showing this to Bourne, I said: “That is the way of the world. You did the thinking, I got the credit.” Bourne had, however, forgotten his part in the paragraph. His mind was really so full of knowledge, when one could get at it, that he did not remember giving off any part of it. In addition to his quality of close concentration, he acquired a good deal of knowledge in a desultory way. In my library when conversation lagged he would go to the shelves and take down book after book, reading a little here or there, lighting especially upon any books that had been acquired since his previous visit, and with reading he would comment. This love of browsing in a library he acquired when a boy, so his brother informs me, and when at Yale it was said that he knew the library as well as the librarian himself.
It will be remembered that last spring our accomplished editor, Mr. Smith, decided that he could no longer bear the burden of this highly important work; and the question of a fit successor came up at once in the mind of our President. Writing to me while I was in Europe, he expressed the desire of consulting with me on the subject as soon as I returned. I was unfortunately unable to get back in time for the June meeting of the Society; and afterwards when I reached Boston the President had gone West, and when he got home I was at Seal Harbor. To spare me the trip to Boston and Lincoln, he courteously offered to come to see me at Seal Harbor, where we had the opportunity to discuss the subject in all its bearings. It will be quite evident from this narrative that my choice for editor would be no other than Professor Bourne, and I was much gratified to learn that [p200] the President from his own observation and reflection had determined on the same man. Mr. Adams had been accustomed to see Bourne at meetings of the American Historical Association and at dinners of their Council; but, so he informed me, he was not specially impressed by him until he read the essay on Marcus Whitman, which gave him a high idea of Bourne’s power of working over material, and his faculty of trenchant criticism. We arrived readily at the conclusion that Bourne would be an ideal editor and that the position would suit him perfectly. Relieved of the drudgery of teaching, he could give full swing to his love of books and to his desire of running down through all the authorities some fact or reference bearing upon the subject in hand. The work would be a labor of love on which he could bring to bear his knowledge, conscientious endeavor, and historical training. It would have been a case of mutual benefit. He would be fortunate in securing such a position, and the Society might be congratulated on being able to get a man so peculiarly qualified for editorial work. But there was the question of Bourne’s health. We both knew that he had been failing, but we were not aware that his case was hopeless. The President did not wish to present his recommendation to the Council until there was a reasonable chance of his recovery, and I undertook from time to time to get information from a common friend in New Haven of his progress. But there was no good news. While Bourne, with the help of his devoted wife, made an energetic fight for life, it was unavailing. In his death Yale lost an excellent teacher of history and this Society a candidate who, if he had been chosen, would have made an accomplished editor.
[1] Bourne also revised the manuscript of my fourth volume, but the conditions did not admit of our being together more than two days, and the revision was not so satisfactory to either of us as that of the first three volumes.
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THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
Printed in Scribner’s Magazine, of February, 1903.
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THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
The English Constitution, as it existed between 1760 and 1787, was the model of the American, but parts of it were inapplicable to the conditions in which the thirteen Colonies found themselves, and where the model failed the Convention struck out anew. The sagacity of the American statesmen in this creative work may well fill Englishmen, so Sir Henry Maine wrote, “with wonder and envy.” Mr. Bryce’s classification of constitutions as flexible and rigid is apt: of our Constitution it may be said that in the main it is rigid in those matters which should not be submitted to the decision of a legislature or to a popular vote without checks which secure reflection and a chance for the sober second thought, and that it has proved flexible in its adaptation to the growth of the country and to the development of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, though, it is flexible to the extent of lacking precision. An instance of this is the proviso for the counting of the electoral vote. “The votes shall then be counted” are the words. Thus, when in 1876 it was doubtful whether Tilden or Hayes had been chosen President, a fierce controversy arose as to who should count the votes, the President of the Senate or Congress. While many regretted the absence of an incontrovertible provision, it was fortunate for the country that the Constitution did not provide that the vote should be counted by the President of the Senate, who, the Vice President having died in office, was in 1877 a creature of the partisan majority. It is doubtful, too, if the decision of such an officer would have been acquiesced in by the mass of Democrats, who thought that [p204] they had fairly elected their candidate. There being no express declaration of the Constitution, it devolved upon Congress to settle the dispute; the ability and patriotism of that body was equal to the crisis. By a well-devised plan of arbitration, Congress relieved the strain and provided for a peaceful settlement of a difficulty which in most countries would have led to civil war.
In the provisions conferring the powers and defining the duties of the executive the flexible character of the Constitution is shown in another way. Everything is clearly stated, but the statements go not beyond the elementary. The Convention knew what it wanted to say, and Gouverneur Morris, who in the end drew up the document, wrote this part of it, as indeed all other parts, in clear and effective words. It is due to him, wrote Laboulaye, that the Constitution has a “distinctness entirely French, in happy contrast to the complicated language of the English laws.” Yet on account of the elementary character of the article of the Constitution on the powers of the President, there is room for inference, a chance for development, and an opportunity for a strong man to imprint his character upon the office. The Convention, writes Mr. Bryce, made its executive a George III “shorn of a part of his prerogative,” his influence and dignity diminished by a reduction of the term of office to four years. The English writer was thoroughly familiar with the Federalist, and appreciated Hamilton’s politic efforts to demonstrate that the executive of the Constitution was modeled after the governors of the states, and not after the British monarch; but “an enlarged copy of the state governor,” Mr. Bryce asserts, is one and the same thing as “a reduced and improved copy of the English king.” But, on the other hand, Bagehot did not believe that the Americans comprehended the English [p205] Constitution. “Living across the Atlantic,” he wrote, “and misled by accepted doctrines, the acute framers of the Federal Constitution, even after the keenest attention, did not perceive the Prime Minister to be the principal executive of the British Constitution, and the sovereign a cog in the mechanism;” and he seems to think that if this had been understood the executive power would have been differently constituted.