In the provisions conferring the powers and defining the duties of the executive the flexible character of the Constitution is shown in another way. Everything is clearly stated, but the statements go not beyond the elementary. The Convention knew what it wanted to say, and Gouverneur Morris, who in the end drew up the document, wrote this part of it, as indeed all other parts, in clear and effective words. It is due to him, wrote Laboulaye, that the Constitution has a "distinctness entirely French, in happy contrast to the complicated language of the English laws." Yet on account of the elementary character of the article of the Constitution on the powers of the President, there is room for inference, a chance for development, and an opportunity for a strong man to imprint his character upon the office. The Convention, writes Mr. Bryce, made its executive a George III "shorn of a part of his prerogative," his influence and dignity diminished by a reduction of the term of office to four years. The English writer was thoroughly familiar with the _Federalist_, and appreciated Hamilton's politic efforts to demonstrate that the executive of the Constitution was modeled after the governors of the states, and not after the British monarch; but "an enlarged copy of the state governor," Mr. Bryce asserts, is one and the same thing as "a reduced and improved copy of the English king." But, on the other hand, Bagehot did not believe that the Americans comprehended the English Constitution. "Living across the Atlantic," he wrote, "and misled by accepted doctrines, the acute framers of the Federal Constitution, even after the keenest attention, did not perceive the Prime Minister to be the principal executive of the British Constitution, and the sovereign a cog in the mechanism;" and he seems to think that if this had been understood the executive power would have been differently constituted.