The Sun.
London, England, 1867-04-06 00:00:00

Responsible Government.

We have been taken sk for calling attention
to signs that our Government is degenerating out
of its own forms and limits, and shaping itself into
conformity with other principles than those with
which it started into existence. Responsible gover-
ment is the term used by the English for defining
their peculiar way of administering public affairs.
They have a fashion of keeping the forms of old
things long.i after the substance has disappeared.
They have a king or queen, in whom they claim the
executive power isvested ; and they take care to do
all outward reverence to this so-called executive.
But they know, and no one knows it better than
the king himself, that their royal executive is a sham.
It is but a few years since Sir Robert Peel, as Prime
Minister, publicly dictated to the Queen certain
changes in what may be called the higher class of
her body-servants. The first servant of the Crown
in England is master of everything, master of the
helpless wearer of the Crown. This first servant of
the Crown is himself subject only to Parliament,
and to it he is absolutely subject. The English
Executive, as a separate power in Government, long
since disappeared by its absorption into the Legis-
lature. We started here with rejecting all shams,
and there is nothing of which
we have been more
proud than our substantial and powerful Execu-
tive. We threw aside with disdain the maxim
that " the king can do no wrong ;" and avowed
our intention to hold our king responsible in his
own person for whatever he or his chosen ser-
vants should -do ; responsible not only at fixed
periods to the popular judgment, but answer-
able at any time to a court which we provided
for trying and condemning him just as any other
criminal is tried and condemned. The vicarious
responsibility of the king's ministers for the king's
crimes was not a remedy to suit the straightfor-
ward men who put together our government. By
a simple law of the late Congress all this has been
changed. A responsible executive, in the Ameri-
can sense, no longer exists, and responsible govern-
ment of the English fashion has been partially
brought into use. Heretofore the President has
been looked upon as answerable for all matters
of administration, and has, as a matter of justice
in view of such responsibility, been left free
to choose his own chief clerks. The Cabinet
Ministers were required, as was the case with
other officers, to have their appointments
confirmed by the Senate ; but in practice the
Senate, iu view of the direct responsibility of the
President for all administrative matters, refused to
put any restraint upon his free choice for these high
appointments. Practically our President has chosen
his own Ministers. Now he cannot remove any one
of his Cabinet, no matter how insubordinate, no mat-
ter how incompetent he may prove to be, no matter
how dishonestly he may be conducting his depart-
ment, unless the Senate consents to such removal.
Mr. Seward may take it into his head to snub Louis
Napoleon so rudely that he cannot decline war; the
Secretary of the Navy may scud the whole fleet of
monitors to the arctic regions to find out if they will
float in the polar ocean ; the Secretary of the Treasury
may compromise away the whole Custom-house
revenue ; the Attorney-General may direct nolle
prosequi against every indicted criminal ; the Secre-
tary of the Interior may excite all the Indian tribes
into war by robbing them of their pensions and
lands; the whole Cabinet may quarrel when they
meet, like cats and dogs ; the Secretary of Var
may even be provoked to tweak the nose of the
President in Cabinet Session, and yet the President,
in the absence of the Senate, can apply neither re-
straint nor remedy. It is manifest that the direct
responsibility to which the American people have
heretofore held their chief executive officer can no
11 We army
longer, with justice, be enforced,