"Experience has demonstrated the more than human wisdom of the framers of the great federal compact which for more than a century, in peace and amid the stress of war, has held States and people in indissoluble bond of union. In no part of their matchless handiwork has it been more clearly manifested than in the creation of a responsible executive. To secure in the largest measure the great ends of government, responsibility must attach to the executive office; and of necessity, with responsibility, _power._ The sooner France learns from the American Republic this important lesson, the sooner will government attain with her the stability to which it is now a stranger. Her statesmen might well recall the words of Lord Bacon: 'What men will not alter for the better, Time, the great innovator, will alter for the worse.' "The splendid commonwealth in which we are assembled contains a population a million greater than did the entire country at the first inauguration of President Washington. The one hundred and nine years which have passed since that masterful hour in history have witnessed the addition of thirty-two States to our federal Union, and of seventy millions to our population. And yet, with but few amendments, our great organic law as fully meets the requirements of a self-governing people to-day as when it came from the hands of its framers. The builders of the Constitution wisely ordained the Presidential office a co-ordinate department of the Government. Moving in its own clearly defined orbit, without usurpation or lessening of prerogative, the great executive office, at the close as at the beginning of the century, is the recognized constitutional symbol of authority and of power. The delegated functions and prerogatives that pertained in our infancy and weakness have proved ample in the days of our strength and greatness as a nation. "It is well that to the people was entrusted the sovereign power of choosing their chief magistrate. It is our glory, in the retrospect of more than a century, that none other than patriots --statesmen well equipped for the discharge of its timeless duties --have ever been chosen to the Presidency. May we not believe that the past is the earnest of the future, and that during the rolling years and centuries the incumbents of the great office--the chosen successors of Washington and of Lincoln--in the near and in the remote future, will prove the guardians and defenders of the Constitution, the guardians and defenders of the rights of all the people?