The Queen Can Do No Wrong; But Therefore, In
All Matters Of Policy And Governance, She Must Be Ruled By
Advice.
For that advice her ministers are responsible; and no act of policy
or governance can be done in England
As to which responsibility does
not immediately settle on the shoulders appointed to bear it. But
this is not so in the States. The President is nominally
responsible. But from that every-day working responsibility, which
is to us so invaluable, the President is in fact free.
I will give an instance of this. Now, at this very moment of my
writing, news has reached us that President Lincoln has relieved
General McClellan from the command of the whole army, that he has
given separate commands to two other generals - to General Halleck,
namely, and, alas! to General Fremont, and that he has altogether
altered the whole organization of the military command as it
previously existed. This he did not only during war, but with
reference to a special battle, for the special fighting of which he,
as ex-officio commander-in-chief of the forces, had given orders. I
do not hereby intend to criticise this act of the President's, or to
point out that that has been done which had better have been left
undone. The President, in a strategetical point of view, may have
been, very probably has been, quite right. I, at any rate, cannot
say that he has been wrong. But then neither can anybody else say
so with any power of making himself heard. Of this action of the
President's, so terribly great in its importance to the nation, no
one has the power of expressing any opinion to which the President
is bound to listen. For four years he has this sway, and at the end
of four years he becomes so powerless that it is not then worth the
while of any demagogue in a fourth-rate town to occupy his voice
with that President's name. The anger of the country as to the
things done both by Pierce and Buchanan is very bitter. But who
wastes a thought upon either of these men? A past President in the
United States is of less consideration than a past mayor in an
English borough. Whatever evil he may have done during his office,
when out of office he is not worth the powder which would be
expended in an attack.
But the President has his ministers as our Queen has hers. In one
sense he has such ministers. He has high State servants who under
him take the control of the various departments, and exercise among
them a certain degree of patronage and executive power. But they
are the President's ministers, and not the ministers of the people.
Till lately there has been no chief minister among them, nor am I
prepared to say that there is any such chief at present. According
to the existing theory of the government these gentlemen have simply
been the confidential servants of the commonwealth under the
President, and have been attached each to his own department without
concerted political alliance among themselves, without any
acknowledged chief below the President, and without any combined
responsibility even to the President.
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