y,
where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative
functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular
deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of
their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on
some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter. But in a
representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully
limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the
legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, 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 co-ordinate departments. It is not
unfrequently a question of real nicety in legislative bodies, whether
the operation of a particular measure will, or will not, extend beyond
the legislative sphere. 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.

I have appealed to our own experience for the truth of what I advance on
this subject. Were it necessary to verify this experience by particular
proofs, they might be multiplied without end. I might find a witness
in every citizen who has shared in, or been attentive to, the course of
public administrations. I might coll