of their salaries.
Reluctantly they yielded to the demand for federal courts, consenting at
first only to a supreme court to review cases heard in lower state
courts and finally to such additional inferior courts as Congress might
deem necessary.

_The System of Checks and Balances._--It is thus apparent that the
framers of the Constitution, in shaping the form of government, arranged
for a distribution of power among three branches, executive,
legislative, and judicial. Strictly speaking we might say four branches,
for the legislature, or Congress, was composed of two houses, elected in
different ways, and one of them, the Senate, was made a check on the
President through its power of ratifying treaties and appointments. "The
accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the
same hands," wrote Madison, "whether of one, a few, or many, and whether
hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the
very definition of tyranny." The devices which the convention adopted to
prevent such a centralization of authority were exceedingly ingenious
and well calculated to accomplish the purposes of the authors.

The legislature consisted of two houses, the members of which were to be
apportioned on a different basis, elected in different ways, and to
serve for different terms. A veto on all its acts was vested in a
President elected in a manner not employed in the choice of either
branch of the legislature, serving for four years, and subject to
removal only by the difficult process of impeachment. After a law had
run the gantlet of both houses and the executive, it was subject to
interpretation and annulment by the judiciary, appointed by the
President with the consent of the Senate and serving for life. Thus it
was made almost impossible for any political party to get possession of
all branches of the government at a single popular election. As Hamilton
remarked, the friends of good government considered "every institution
calculated to restrain the excess of law making and to keep things in
the same state in which they happen to be at any given period as more
likely to do good than harm."

=The Powers of the Federal Government.=--On the question of the powers
to be conferred upon the new government there was less occasion for a
serious dispute. Even the delegates from the small states agreed with
those from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia that new powers
should be added to