As I speak, a movement is in progress, with the sanction of President Harding, to permit members of his Cabinet to appear in Congress and thus defend directly and in person the policies of the Executive.

This separation of the two departments, which causes so much friction, has been emphasized by one feature of the Constitution which again marks its distrust of democracy, namely the fixed tenure of office.

The Constitution did not intend that public officials should rise or fall with the fleeting caprices of a constituency.

It preferred to give the President and the members of Congress a fixed term of office, and, however unpopular they might become temporarily, they should have the right and the opportunity to proceed even with unpopular policies, and thus…

If a parliamentary form of government, immediately responsive to current opinion as registered in elections, is the great desideratum, then the fixed tenure of offices is the vulnerable Achilles-heel of our form of government.

In America, the President, who is merely the Executive of the legislative will, continues for his prescribed term, though he may have wholly lost the confidence of the representatives of the people in Congress.

I am confident that after the sinking of the Lusitania, the United States would have entered the world war, if President Wilson's tenure of power had then depended upon a vote of confidence.

Nothing, excepting the principle of local rule, was of deeper concern to the framers of the Constitution.

When it was framed, it was the accepted principle of all other nations that the control of the foreign relations of the Government was the exclusive prerogative of the Executive.

The framers were unwilling to lodge any such power in the Executive, however great his powers in other respects.

While they had created a central government for certain specified purposes, they yet regarded themselves as sovereign nations, and their representatives in the Senate were, in a sense, their ambassadors.

They were as little inclined to permit the President of the United States to make treaties or declare war at will in their behalf as the European nations would be to-day to vest a similar authority in the League of Nations.

It often handicaps the United States from taking a speedy and effectual part in international negotiations, although if the President and the Senate be in harmony and collaborate in this joint responsibility, there is no necessary reason…

I share the view of many Americans that this provision of the Constitution was wise and salutary, especially at this time, when the United States has taken such an important position in the councils of civilization.

Generally he is elected by little more than a majority of the people, and sometimes through the curious workings of the electoral college system, he has been only the choice of a minority of the electorate.

For these reasons, the framers of the Constitution were unwilling to vest in the President exclusively the immeasurable power of pledging the faith, man-power, and resources of the nation and of declaring war.

For better or worse, the United States has limited, but not destroyed, as the world war showed, its freedom to antagonize powerful nations from whose people it has drawn large numbers of its own citizenship.

The Constitution wisely refused to grant such a power.

At all events, it constitutes a system which, as the last presidential election showed, the American people will not willingly forgo.

You would not surrender such an integral part of your system, and therefore it is not reasonable to expect a similar sacrifice on our part, even though the meritorious purposes of the League be freely recognized.

To understand the Constitution of the United States you must not only read the text but the thousands of opinions rendered in the last 130 years by the Supreme Court in its great task of interpreting this wonderful document.

But what of its future and how long will the Constitution wholly resist the washing of time and circumstance?

Lord Macaulay once ventured the prediction that the Constitution would prove unworkable as soon as there were no longer large areas of undeveloped land and when the United States became a nation of great cities.

Institutions purely democratic will sooner or later destroy liberty or civilization, or both....

The American Constitution is all sail and no anchor.