BOOK SEVENTH.

CHAPTER I.

Executive Officers.-Difficulty of controlling them.-Their Interference with Elections; in Athens, Rome, France, England, the United States.-Plato's Opinion of the Duties of Officers.-Post Office.-The Chief Executive Officer. Confidential Officers.-Official Interpretation of Constitutions and Laws. -The Veto.-Ancient and Modern Veto.-Absolute, suspensive and conditional Vetos.-Privilege of Pardoning in Monarchies; in Republics.— Danger and Difficulty in Republics.-For what purpose is it granted?— Rules which ought to be observed in making use of the Power of Pardoning.

I. "How can a man serve the public? When out of office his sole object is to attain it; and when he has attained it, his only anxiety is to keep it. In his unprincipled dread of losing his place, he will readily go all lengths." These words sound as if they were taken from a modern debate, or a discussion in our papers of recent date, yet they were spoken two thousand five hundred years ago by the greatest sage of a people at the other end of the world, utterly independent in its whole civilisation upon the western, Caucasian race to which we belong-they are the words of the Chinese sage, Confucius, (1) in which I have substituted only the word public for that of prince,—not an illegitimate substitution; for even the Chinese acknowledge in their laws, their classical works, and in the prayers offered up by the emperor, that he is the vicegerent of heaven for

the maintaining of justice, order and morality; in short, for the benefit of the people.

The Greeks found the same difficulty. Not to speak of their whole history, which testifies to the fact, their constant, generally annual rotation in office, the appointment of officers and magistrates by lot, the most extensive system of checks, which, in Athens for instance, was carried out into the minutest details, as the reader may see in Bockh's Public Economy, book ii, 8, or of the repeated and periodical inquiry not only into the accounts of officers, but the whole administration of their office—the εðúv, which the Greeks valued very highly, and upon the absence of which in the Lacedæmonian council, Aristotle animadverts (Politics ii, 9.) or the Athenian nomophylakes, the office for the purpose of controlling the officers-not to mention innumerable laws, institutions and events, which prove the fact, we actually meet with insurrections of the people against the officers, who, it was believed, had established themselves as a party, and become an unlawful oligarchy, such as that mentioned of the Thespians in Thucydides, book vi, 95. See also book vi, 36.

The whole Roman history is one continued commentary on the difficulty and danger to be encountered in the solution of that great political problem, how to give sufficient power to the officers, and, at the same time, to prevent them from arrogating more, and uniting into a formidable aristocracy of official places.

Modern monarchies and republics offer no different spectacle. The crown or executive has the command over the legion of executive officers, and must have it in a high degree, for otherwise no government would be able to obtain its end; and, on the other hand, this

influence is abused for purposes separate from the interests of the state, or directly hostile to the liberties of the people, and the very objects for which alone the whole government is established, and the different officers have received authority under and within the same. Every executive, of whatever name, king, president or consul, and every subaltern under them,-—indeed, every one that has power,-feels, when opposed, the desire rise in his bosom to carry his point, and interrupt the steady course of law by the "per speciale mandatum regis," by which the Stuarts would have set at nought all British liberty, had they been suffered to do it. The whole struggle for civil liberty in England turns upon what the commons thought undue influence of the executive in setting aside acts of parliaments, despite of special acts of parliaments against this license, and the boldly arrogated influence and direction of elections on the part of the executive, which forms a peculiar difficulty relating to this subject in all representative governments. (2)

In France, to speak but of the latest times, we find that the first charge against Polignac, when impeached after the July revolution, of 1830, was that of having unconstitutionally interfered with the freedom of election, in sending circulars to all public functionaries, requiring them to vote for the ministerial candidates, in addition to which, written evidence was exhibited, by which it appeared that places and offices had been promised in return for votes. (3)

In the United States we find in the report made by a committee sent in 1839, by congress to the city of New York, to inquire into certain affairs connected with the custom officers of that city, that they had been

assessed, not indeed by authority, in proportion to their salaries to furnish contributions toward election expenses. Nor is it possible here to pass over in silence what has happened in the state of Maryland, in the year 1836, an open interference of the office holders with the election laws of the state.

(1) Lun-yu, Conversations and Sayings of Confucius, recorded by his Disciples, chap. 17, sect. 16, quoted from Davis's "The Chinese."

(2) It is, perhaps, not useless for me to refer here, among the many authors and collections relating to this point, to Brodie's British Empire, vol. i, p. 113 et seq. and indeed, to the whole of his Introduction; the reader will find there and in Hallam's Constitutional History, all the necessary references carefully collected. (3) English Annual Register of 1830, published in 1831, p. 224.

II. The difficulty then has been felt at all times, and in all governments, but in some respects it greatly increases with the establishment and firmer securing of modern liberty, such as it has been characterized in the previous book. A government, whose only object is security and justice, not liberty, has to watch over the honesty, efficiency, and obedience of the officers only; but where the additional, and a great, object of government is the securing and protecting of liberty, the people have a right to watch over the officers that they do not interfere with it, especially that they do not with the elections, the primary agent by which we endeavor to secure it. If the officers paid by the state, that is, by the people, to serve as agents of the government, which, as was observed, ought to protect liberty, interfere with it, it virtually amounts to conspiring against one of the greatest state objects, a capital usurpation. We have seen that the very idea of modern liberty— state-liberty as contradistinguished to feudal corporation

liberty-requires enlarged societies and continuous and systematic governments. These then require a large number of officers well united into one coherent system, and thus, of course, expose society in the same degree to the danger of seeing those who were intended to be the mere agents of the law and government, becoming the masters or leaders, secure in their places, from which it may become the highest interest of society to dislodge them. There is no single and absolute principle, however, by the strict adherence to which we may be sure to avoid all difficulty, as by the fixed operation of a machine. The contrary has been frequently erroneously supposed. The Greeks finally threw aside all consideration of talent and peculiar moral fitness-for it was peculiar moral unfitness only which could disqualify, if this, indeed, did-and resorted to the lot. The state, as was natural, rapidly declined, and bribery and dishonesty became the order of the day. Incessant rotation begets evils as great as the danger intended to be avoided by it. It prevents any one from making himself thoroughly acquainted with his official duties, deprives society of the service of many most qualified persons, and, by holding out a hope to the least qualified to have their turn of office, begets a general greediness and thirst for it, and a mean anxiety for salary among those who either are unfit or indisposed for any steady, regular, and laborious trade or profession,-to the exclusion of those, to whom an office no longer affords any inducement, either by way of remuneration or honor to interrupt their own proper pursuits. Thus the government sinks gradually more and more, and becomes the most expensive of all; for there is nothing more expensive than to feed indolence and