description needs one very important qualification. He wields, with
certain slight restrictions, the whole executive power of government, but
neither he nor any of his ministers can, like the ministers of our King,
sit or speak in the Legislature, nor can he, like our King, dissolve that
Legislature. He has indeed a veto on Acts of Congress, which can only be
overridden by a large majority in both Houses. But the executive and the
legislative powers in America were purposely so constituted as to be
independent of each other to a degree which is unknown in this country.

It is perhaps not very commonly understood that President and Congress
alike are as strictly fettered in their action by the Constitution as a
limited liability company is by its Memorandum of Association. This
Constitution, which defines both the form of government and certain
liberties of the subject, is not unalterable, but it can be altered only
by a process which requires both the consent of a great majority in
Congress or alternatively of a great majority of the legislatures of the
distinct States composing the Union, and also ratification of amendments
by three-fourths of the several States. Thus we shall have to notice
later that a "Constitutional Amendment" abolishing slavery became a
terror of the future to many people in the slave States, but remained all
the time an impossibility in the view of most people in the free States.

We have, above all things, to dismiss from our minds any idea that the
Legislature of a State is subordinate to the Congress of the United
States, or that a State Governor is an officer under the President. The
Constitution of the Union was the product of a half-developed sense of
nationality. Under it the State authority (in the American sense of
"State") and the Union or Federal authority go on side by side working in
separate spheres, each subject to Constitutional restrictions, but each
in its own sphere supreme. Thus the State authority is powerless to make