Hamilton was apprehensive of danger to liberty from the legislative
department and favored a strong executive to guard against it. He
declared in the "Federalist" that the legislative department was
"everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power
into its impetuous vortex,"--that the people "never seem to have
recollected the danger from legislative usurpation which by assembling
all power in the same hands must lead to the same tyranny as is
threatened by executive usurpation." Washington in his Farewell
Address, after much experience with, and observation of, legislative
action, said: "The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of
political power by dividing and distributing it in different
depositaries and constituting each the guardian of the public weal
against invasions by the others has been evinced by experiments
ancient and modern, some of them in our own country and under our own
eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them."

After having lived for generations under governments in which there
was no effective division of powers, the people of the various
colonies in setting up their own governments at the time of the
Revolution very generally declared for such division, in more or less
explicit terms. Even in the few cases where the division was not
expressly made, it was implied in the constitution. The provision in
the constitution of Massachusetts adopted in 1780 may be cited as an
example of the strength of the conviction. "In the government of this
Commonwealth the legislative department shall never exercise the
executive and judicial powers or either of them; the executive shall
never exercise the legislative and judicial powers or either of them;
the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers
or either of them." To this provision were appended, as the reason for
it, the memorable words, "To the end that it may be a government of
laws and not of men."

From 1776 to the present century as new states were formed their
people in most instances have adopted similar provisions. Perhaps the
people of Maine when they separated from Massachusetts in 1820
adopted the most stringent provision by prohibiting not only the
departments but all the persons in either department from exercising
any of the powers properly belonging to either of the other
departments.

Of course some exceptions to the rule are necessary and these are
usually