The Executive in the United States stands on an independent though elective footing; if it depended for its existence from day to day on the factions of Congress, chaos would soon come. Is there any prospect of a return to party union and solidity? As intellects grow more active, idiosyncracies more pronounced, ambitions more numerous and keen, is it likely that divergences will become fewer and that patient submission to party discipline will increase? Is not the tendency everywhere the opposite way? What permanent claim has party on the allegiance of a moral being? What is it but a soft name for faction, the bane of States? Why should a good citizen surrender his conscience to it? Why should good citizens for ever divide themselves into two hostile camps, and wage political war against each other? Is an unpatriotic and anti-social principle to be accepted as the last word of politics? The supply of organic questions cannot be inexhaustible. When it is exhausted and divisions of principle have disappeared, on what ground of reason or moral motive are parties to rest? Must they not thenceforth become factions pure and simple? Have they not become factions pure and simple, whenever organic questions have ceased to be at issue? Party has been the organ by which in England the Long Revolution has been conducted to its issue, and power has been gradually wrested from the Crown and transferred to the Commons. Hence the belief, shared by the whole of Europe, that party was inseparable from Parliamentary institutions, and that in no other way could free government be carried on. If free government can be carried on in no other way, the prospect is dark, for party is apparently doomed, alike by morality and by the growing tendencies of the age. But there is obviously one other way at least in which free government can be carried on. Instead of making office the prize of a perpetual faction fight, the members of the Executive Council of State may be regularly elected by the Members of the Legislature for a term certain, under such a system with regard to the rotation of vacancies as may at once secure sufficient harmony between the two bodies and a sufficient continuity in the executive government. The responsibility of the Executive for the decisions of the Legislature, and its obligation to resign upon every Legislative defeat, which is a mere accident of English history and devoid of rational foundation, would then cease. The Legislature and the Executive would be at liberty each to do its own work. The Executive would be national, and would receive the general support of the community instead of being an object of organized hostility to half of it; it would be stable instead of being as it is now throughout Europe ephemeral as well as weak. Responsibility on the part of its members instead of being diminished would be increased. It would become individual, whereas now it is only collective, the whole Cabinet and the party majority being bound to