University of Virginia Library

GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES.[51]

Power being found by universal experience liable to abuses,
a distribution of it into separate departments, has become a
first principal of free governments. By this contrivance, the
portion entrusted to the same hands being less, there is less
room to abuse what is granted; and the different hands
being interested, each in maintaining its own, there is less
opportunity to usurp what is not granted. Hence the merited
praise of governments modelled on a partition of their
powers into legislative, executive, and judiciary, and a repartition
of the legislative into different houses.

The political system of the United States claims still higher
praise. The power delegated by the people is first divided
between the general government and the state governments;
each of which is then subdivided into legislative, executive,

and judiciary departments. And as in a single government
these departments are to be kept separate and safe, by a
defensive armour for each; so, it is to be hoped, do the two
governments possess each the means of preventing or correcting
unconstitutional encroachments of each other.

Should this improvement on the theory of free government
not be marred in the execution, it may prove the best
legacy ever left by lawgivers to their country, and the best
lesson ever given to the world by its benefactors. If a security
against power lies in the division of it into parts mutually
controuling each other, the security must increase with
the increase of the parts into which the whole can be conveniently
formed.

It must not be denied that the task of forming and maintaining
a division of power between different governments, is
greater than among different departments of the same governments;
because it may be more easy (though sufficiently
difficult) to separate, by proper definitions, the legislative,
executive, and judiciary powers, which are more distinct in
their nature, than to discriminate, by precise enumerations,
one class of legislative powers from another class, one class of
executive from another class, and one class of judiciary from
another class; where the powers being of a more kindred
nature, their boundaries are more obscure and run more into
each other.

If the test be difficult, however, it must by no means be
abandoned. Those who would pronounce it impossible, offer
no alternative to their country but schism, or consolidation;
both of them bad, but the latter the worst, since it is the
high road to monarchy, than which nothing worse, in the eye
of republicans, could result from the anarchy implied in the
former.

Those who love their country, its repose, and its republicanism,
will study to avoid the alternative, by elucidating and
guarding the limits which define the two governments; by
inculcating moderation in the exercise of the powers of both,

and particularly a mutual abstinence from such as might
nurse present jealousies, or engender greater.

In bestowing the eulogies due to the particular and internal
checks of power, it ought not the less to be remembered,
that they are neither the sole nor the chief palladium of constitutional
liberty. The people who are authors of this blessing,
must also be its guardians. Their eyes must be ever
ready to mark, their voice to pronounce, and their arm to
repel or repair aggressions on the authority of their constitutions;
the highest authority next to their own, because the
immediate work of their own, and the most sacred part of
their property, as recognizing and recording the title to every
other.