ve, the
sovereign. And this was associated in their minds with another profound
misconception, which influenced all this part of their work. They
thought that to keep the legislative and executive offices distinct and
separate was the very palladium of liberty; and they all took it for
granted, without a moment's question, that the British Constitution did
this thing. England, they thought, is governed by King, Lords, and
Commons, and the supreme power is nicely divided between the three, so
that neither one can get the whole of it, and that is the safeguard of
English liberty. So they arranged President, Senate, and Representatives
to correspond, and sedulously sought to divide supreme power between the
three, so that they might operate as checks upon each other. If either
one should ever succeed in acquiring the whole sovereignty, then they
thought there would be an end of American liberty.

[Sidenote: Influence of Montesquieu and Blackstone.]

Now in the earlier part of the work of the Federal Convention, in
dealing with the legislative department, the delegates were on firm
ground, because they were dealing with things of which they knew
something by experience; but in all this careful separation of the
executive power from the legislative they went wide of the mark, because
they were following a theory which did not truly describe things as they
really existed. And that was because the English Constitution was, and
still is, covered up with a thick husk of legal fictions which long ago
ceased to have any vitality. Blackstone, the great authority of the
eighteenth century, set forth this theory of the division of power
between King, Lords, and Commons with clearness and force, and nobody
then understood English history minutely or thoroughly enough to see its
fallaciousness. Montesquieu also, the ablest and most elegant political
writer of the age, with whose works most of the statesmen in the Federal
Convention were familiar, gave a similar description of the English
Constitution, and generalized from it as the ideal constitution for a
free people. But Montesquieu and Blackstone, in their treatment of this
point, had their eyes upon the legal fictions, and were blind to the
real machinery which was working under them. They gave elegant
expression to what the late Mr. Bagehot called the "literary theory" of
the English Constitution. But the real thing differed essentially from
the "literary theory" even in their da