Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/186

cians corresponded to the vital principles of the British Constitution. His disciples supposed that one such principle was the separation of the legislative from the executive power. This, says Bagehot, was the 'literary' and therefore the utterly wrong theory. The Americans naturally had George III. on the brain. George III. represented the executive in England, and had interfered unduly with the legislative. If the American President was the true analogue of the English monarch, the essential point was to provide security against this abuse. Carry out the principle of the division of powers more thoroughly; separate the President from the Congress; and there would be no danger of a Washington or a Jefferson becoming a George III. or a Cromwell. This involved a thorough misconception. The President was really analogous not to the king, but to the Prime Minister. To divide his functions from the functions of Congress would, therefore, be like making the English Prime Minister independent of parliamentary control. That would clearly involve a complete dislocation of the whole English system. The fact—obscured for a time by George III.'s personal influence—was that the Minister had really become the centre of the