The framers of the French Republican Constitution of 1875 did the United States the honour to copy incorrectly, and absolutely to misapply, certain leading features of our organic law. In order to accomplish purposes absolutely inconsistent with all American ideas of liberty and of justice, the parliamentary revolutionists who got possession of power in France in 1879 have so twisted to their own ends this French Constitution of 1875, that their government of the Third French Republic in 1890 really resembles the government of the Akhoond of Swat about as nearly as it resembles the government of the American Republic under Washington.
The parliamentary revolutionists of the Third French Republic are Republicans first and then Frenchmen. The framers of the American Republic were Americans first and then Republicans. The Republic which they framed was an experiment imposed upon the American people, not by philosophers and fanatics, but by the force of circumstances. The ablest of the men who framed it were not Republicans by theory. On the contrary, they had been born and bred under a monarchy. Under that monarchy they had enjoyed a measure of civil and religious liberty which the Third Republic certainly refuses to Frenchmen in France to-day. M. Jules Ferry and M. Constans have no lessons to give in law or in liberty to which George Washington, or John Adams, or even Thomas Jefferson, would have listened with toleration while the Crown still adorned the legislative halls of the British colonies in America. Our difficulties with the mother country began, not with the prerogative of the Crown—that gave our fathers so little trouble that one of the original thirteen States lived and prospered under a royal charter from Charles II. down to the middle of the nineteenth century—but with the encroachments of the Parliament. The roots of the affection which binds Americans to the American Republic strike deep down into the history of American freedom under the British monarchy. The forms have changed, the living substance is the same. Americans know at least as well as Englishmen what the most intelligent of French Republicans apparently have still to learn, that liberty is impossible without loyalty to something higher than self-interest and self-will.
This sufficiently explains to me a remark often cited as made to Sir Theodore Martin by General Grant during the ex-President's visit to England, to the effect that Englishmen 'live under institutions which Americans would give their ears to possess.'
General Grant neither was, nor did he pretend to be, a great statesman. But he was an American of the Americans. Four years of Civil War and eight years of Presidential power had not been thrown away upon him. He came into the Presidency as the successor of Andrew Johnson, who was made President by the bullet of an assassin, and who was impeached, as I have said, before the Senate for doing his plain constitutional duty, by an unscrupulous parliamentary cabal.
He left the Presidency, to be succeeded in it by a President who derived the more than doubtful title under which he took his seat from a Commission unknown to the Constitution, and accepted by the American people only as the alternative of political chaos and of a fresh civil war.
Through his position at the head of the American army, General Grant, as I have already mentioned, had been drawn into the contest between President Johnson and the parliamentary cabal bent on breaking down the constitutional authority of the Executive.
Going into the Presidency fresh from this drama, in 1869, General Grant went out of the Presidency in 1877, after a drama not less impressive and instructive had been enacted under his eyes, which threatened for many weeks to result in a complete failure of the machinery provided by the American Constitution for the lawful and orderly transmission of the executive authority. It did, in fact, result in the adoption by Congress of an extra-constitutional expedient, by which the orderly transmission of the executive authority was secured, but the lawful transmission of it—as I believe, and as I think I have reason to know General Grant believed—was defeated.
Whether the constitutional machinery would or would not have carried us safely through if the final strain had been put upon it, is now an academic question not here to be discussed. But the final strain was evaded by the adoption of the extra-constitutional expedient to which I refer. An Electoral Commission was created by Congress to decide by which of two sets of Presidential electors claiming to have been chosen for that purpose the Presidential vote of certain States should be cast; and it is a curious circumstance that General Grant, who had seen his executive predecessor saved from removal by a single vote in the Senate in 1869, saw his executive successor established in the White House, in 1877, by a single vote in this Electoral Commission.
It would have been strange indeed had the experience of General Grant failed to impress upon him, with at least equal force, the advantages to liberty of a hereditary executive acting as the fountain of social honour, and the disadvantages to liberty of an elective executive tending to become a distributing reservoir of political patronage.
I once had a curious talk bearing on this subject with General Grant after he had retired from the Presidency. He had dined with me to meet and discuss a matter of some importance with a Mexican friend of mine, Señor Romero, long Minister of Finance in Mexico, and now Mexican Envoy at Washington. When I next met the ex-President he reverted with great interest to something which had been incidentally said at this dinner about the experiment of empire made in Mexico by Iturbide, the general who finally broke the power of Spain in that viceroyalty, and secured its independence. I showed him certain documents which I had obtained in Mexico through the kindness of Maximilian's very able Foreign Minister, Señor Ramirez, a most accomplished bibliophile, bearing upon Iturbide's plan for making the American Mediterranean a Mexican lake. He expected to break up the United States by asserting the right of the Mexican Empire to the mouths of the Mississippi, and the whole Spanish dominion as far as the Capes of Florida. 'It seems a mad thing now,' said the ex-President, 'but it was not so mad perhaps then,' and we went on to discuss the schemes of Burr and Wilkinson and the alleged treason of an early Tennessean senator. 'Perhaps it was not a bad thing for us,' he said, 'that the Mexicans shot their first Emperor—but was it a good thing for them?' 'I have sometimes wondered,' he added, 'what would have happened to us if Gates, or—what was at one time, as you know, quite on the cards—Benedict Arnold, instead of George Washington, had commanded the armies of the colonies successfully down to the end at Yorktown.'