EDITORIAL 1 ) EPARTMENT

what the others may have decided for them selves under a similar question." (Works, x, 143.) That principle is as sound to-day as when announced. Any departure from it will work ruin to our institutions. While I be lieve there should be reciprocal confidence be tween the departments, yet I stand on Jeffer son's historic doctrine and claim for the Presi dent exclusive, unqualified, and absolute dis cretion to execute his office, the constitution and the laws of the United States without any regard to what others may have decided for themselves under a similar question."" "Such are the constitutional powers of the President. Their discussion on this occasion seems peculiarly appropriate. We have en tered on a new era of political development. This is the age of executive expansion. Until the rebellion Congress ruled supreme all things centered in it, and under its great leaders it gradually expanded until it assumed a dispro portionate and dangerous ascendency in the government. As civil war settled down over the land it became apparent that both Con gress and the courts stood arrayed against the people. Then out of their ranks came Abra ham Lincoln. Like Pallas Athene of old, he stepped forth from the very head of sov ereignty, crowned with independence, girded about with the constitution, and armed with the express command to preserve the Union. Lincoln was four long years executing that mandate, and over the graves of slavery and nullification and secession he founded a new republic whose spirit is nationality and whose dominating force is the President of the United States. "With all the impetus of the rebellion, those principles now for a generation have been permeating the body politic with an insist ence as irresistible as the forces of nature. The failure to impeach Johnson, the recon struction measures of Grant, Cleveland's struggle for executive independence, and McKinley's extra-territorial policies, all im measurably strengthened the office .and ex panded its domestic and foreign powers. "When President Roosevelt came before the people, he was known throughout the land as the incarnation of nationality and executive expansion. For three years he had main tained a domestic rule as uncompromising as

III

Cleveland's and a foreign policy more ag gressive than McKinley's. He stood on that record, and before the bar of the people un flinchingly maintained the constitutionality of every act of his administration. The Demo cratic party met the issue squarely. Then followed an unprecedented campaign. The whole body politic made the constitutional powers of the President their supreme issue —• not academically, but as applied to represen tative domestic and foreign problems, the Philippines, Panama, the Isthmian canal, the pension order, the trusts. "The verdict of the people was an over whelming indorsement of the President. He had claimed practically all their executive and magisterial sovereignties and absolute discre tion to exercise them, and 7,600,000 electors, representing 46,000,000 citizens, voted that he was right and peremptorily commanded him to use them. "That is my conception of the election of 1904. It was the most remarkable popular interpretation of the constitution ever made in this republic, and every argument I have made shows it was right. Thus my ideal of the President coincides with the ideal of the people — a majestic, constitutional figure, un controlled by Congress, unrestrained by the courts, vested with plenary constitutional power and absolute constitutional discretion — a sovereign over 80,000,000 people, and the servant of 80,000,000 sovereigns, whose sole inspiring purpose is to serve his fellow-citizens, guard their liberties, and make this nation the freest, most enlightened, most powerful sov ereignty ever organized among men." CONTRACTS (Action by Beneficiary)

"THE Limitations of the Action of Assumpsit as Affecting the Right of Action of the Beneficiary" is the title of an article by Craw ford D. Henning in the December American Law Register, (Vol. lii, p. 764) in which he en deavors to show that "the right of action of the beneficiary was previously recognized and firmly established in the ancient actions of debt and of account years before the rise of the action of the case on "promises." "It is safe, therefore," he says, "to assume as an abstract proposition, and aside from the tech