Excerpt from The Creation of the Presidency, 1775-1789: A Study in Constitutional History An eminent political scientist has been heard to remark that, while all political scientists necessarily know some history, there are but few historians who knew political science. The writer of the present study has little hope of upsetting this judgment. But he does claim that the political scientist has kept the office of the presidency of the United States too exclusively within the sphere of his investigations, whereby an organic institution has been too much considered as a mere catalogue of powers. Were it not for that peculiar relation between the executive and the judicial departments which has made the latter very chary in undertaking to say authoritatively what the presidency is and what is is not, this criticism would not be valid. The history of national executive power might then be read in the Supreme Court Reports. But, in the absence of an authority to speak with finality on many vital matters, such, for example, as the nature of the vesting clause, it has been left to the shifting forces of politics to determine the nature of the office, the proper sphere of historical investigation. A further result of this state of things is an enhancement of interest in origins of the office. Lacking authoritative dicta, we may well seek for enlightment concerning what the presidency is in an analysis of what the presidency was intended to be. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.