of the revolutionary National Committee and of the National Assembly proved sufficient.
The Problems of a President.
After my election to the Presidency of the Republic I pondered over the functions of a democratic President in the concrete, not in the abstract as I had done before. It had never occurred to me that I might be President, so entirely was I absorbed in the work of liberation. Though I had observed republican institutions in Switzerland, France and America, and had compared them with constitutional monarchies in England and in Italy by way of verifying the practical accuracy of views derived from study, I had conceived my future position as that of a writer and member of Parliament striving to consolidate and develop our new Republic. I had not even thought of retaining my professorship. Indeed, I had busied myself with the purely theoretical question whether the Presidency of a Republic is not a relic of monarchism. In republican Rome, I reflected, there were two Consuls; and, in Japan, two Emperors. Nor, even in a Monarchy, does one man ever govern a great State alone. It is not practically possible. A monarchy is a kind of oligarchy. Some form of Directory would respond most closely to the letter of democratic principle; though it would be inevitable that, in a Directory of several Presidents, one of them would exercise most influence and wield the chief authority.
Like other peoples, we shall evolve gradually and get away from monarchism little by little. Though the necessary conditions for a Republic exist among us, a strong royalist feeling for Crown and Kingdom was formerly fostered, only the Socialist parties and a section of the intellectual class being republican in principle. Under Austria, the whole of our education was undemocratic ; and, in politics, habit is stronger than reason. Now, under the Republic, the President and all other Republicans have to become truly republican and democratic, for the republic is a form, democracy is the thing itself. The form, the written Constitution, does not always guarantee the substance. Yet, in public life, what matters is the thing itself, the substance. It is easy to write a fine Constitution, less easy to apply it finely and consistently. There are cases in which a monarchy may be more democratic than a republic. Each of the four main types of republic—the Swiss, the French, the American and, to a certain extent, the pre-war German
