Whereas these testimonies, revealing intense and wide-spread convictions of the American people, are reinforced by the friendly observations of De Tocqueville, the remarkable Frenchman to whom our country is under such great and lasting obligations, in his famous work on “Democracy in America,” where he says, in words of singular clearness and force, “Intrigue and corruption are vices natural to elective Governments; but when the chief of the State can be reëlected, these vices extend themselves indefinitely, and compromise the very existence of the country: when a simple candidate seeks success by intrigue, his manœuvres can operate only over a circumscribed space; when, on the contrary, the chief of the State himself enters the lists, he borrows for his own use the force of the Government: in the first case, it is a man, with his feeble means; in the second, it is the State itself, with its immense resources, that intrigues and corrupts”:[141] and then, again, the same great writer, who had studied our country so closely, testifies: “It is impossible to consider the ordinary course of affairs in the United States without perceiving that the desire to be reëlected dominates the thoughts of the President; that the whole policy of his Administration tends toward this point; that his least movements are made subservient to this object; that, especially as the moment of crisis approaches, individual interest substitutes itself in his mind for the general interest”:[142] Whereas all these concurring voices, where patriotism, experience, and reason bear testimony, have additional value at a moment when the country is looking anxiously to a reform of the civil service, for the plain reason that the peril from the Chief Magistrate, so long as he is exposed to temptation, surpasses that from any other quarter, and thus the first stage in this much-desired reform is the One-Term principle, to the end that the President, who exercises the appointing power, reaching into all parts of the country and holding in subserviency a multitudinous army of office-holders, shall be absolutely without motive or inducement to employ it for any other purpose than the public good: And whereas the character of Republican Institutions requires that the Chief Magistrate shall be above all suspicion of using the machinery of which he is the official head to promote his own personal aims: Therefore, _Be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives, &c._, That the following Article is hereby proposed as an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and, when ratified by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States, shall be valid, to all intents and purposes, as part of the Constitution; to wit: ARTICLE ----. SEC. 1. No person who has once held the office of President of the United States shall be thereafter eligible to that office. SEC. 2. This Amendment shall not take effect until after the 4th March, 1873.