If the debts deadlock does not lead to an amendment
of the provisions of the American Constitution regarding the Presidential election it is hard so suppose that any- thing ever can. Mr. Roosevelt, by the way, is of course, not elected yet at all. What happened in November was that the citizens of the United States elected some 541 persons to elect a President. And some time next month the 541 will go to Washington and do it. It can be taken for granted that 472 of them will vote for Roosevelt, but I suppose if they took into their heads to vote for Hoover instead no one could stop them. But that is only a historic survival that means nothing. The paralysis of decision and action through the four months . in which an out-going and defeated President holds office without power means calamitously much. If it happened more often than it does opinion would no doubt have revolted and insisted on a change, but it is only when a Wilson succeeds a Taft, or a Harding a Wilson, that the real difficulty arises, and for another such case you have to go back to McKinley's succession to Cleveland in 1897. But in none of these instances were decisions of world-wide importance held up because the United States still clings in 1932 to a procedure designed to meet the needs of the eighteenth century. What is happening now cannot go quite unregarded even by men who cling to the old practice out of pure conservatism.
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