'
'I have often,' I said, 'wondered how you and Tocqueville, and the other
eminent men who composed the committee for preparing the Constitution,
could have made one incapable of duration, and also incapable of change.'
'What,' he asked, 'are the principal faults which you find in the
Constitution?'
'First,' I said, 'that you gave to your President absolute authority over
the army, the whole patronage of the most centralised and the most
place-hunting country in the world, so that there was not one of your
population of 36,000,000 whose interests he could not seriously affect;
and, having thus armed him with irresistible power, you gave him the
strongest possible motives to employ it against the Constitution by
turning him out at the end of his four years, incapable of re-election,
unpensioned and unprovided for, so that he must have gone from the Elysee
Bourbon to a debtor's prison.
'Next, that, intending your President to be the subordinate Minister of
the Assembly, you gave him the same origin, and enabled him to say, "I
represent the people as much as you do, indeed much more. They _all_
voted for me, only a fraction of them voted for any one of you.
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