nspired, by a supposed influence over
the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength, which
is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a
multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the
objects of its passions by means which reason prescribes, it is against
the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to
indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions." "The
legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from
other circumstances. Its constitutional powers being at once more
extensive and less susceptible of precise limits, it can with the
greater facility mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the
encroachments which it makes on the coordinate departments." "On the
other side, the Executive power being restrained within a narrower
compass and being more simple in its nature, and the judiciary being
described by landmarks still less uncertain, projects of usurpation
by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat
themselves. Nor is this all. As the legislative department alone has
access to the pockets of the people and has in some constitutions full
discretion and in all a prevailing influence over the pecuniary rewards
of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in
the latter which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the
former." "We have seen that the tendency of republican governments is
to an aggrandizement of the legislative at the expense of the other
departments."

Mr. Jefferson, in referring to the early constitution of
Virginia, objected that by its provisions all the powers of
government--legislative, executive, and judicial--resulted to the
legislative body, holding that "the concentrating these in the same
hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no
alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands,
and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would
surely be as oppressive as one." "As little will it avail us that they
are chosen by ourselves. An elective despotism was not the government we
fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles,
but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced
among several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their
legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the
oth