rt, and the principal officer in each of five
departments as they shall from time to time be established; their duty
shall be to advise him in matters which he shall lay before them, but
their advice shall not conclude him, or affect his responsibility." The
plan for such a council found favour with Franklin, Madison, Wilson,
Dickinson, and Mason, but did not satisfy the convention. When it was
voted down Mason used strong language. "In rejecting a council to the
president," said he, "we are about to try an experiment on which the
most despotic government has never ventured; the Grand Seignior himself
has his Divan." It was this failure to provide a council which led the
convention to give to the Senate a share in some of the executive
functions of the president, such as the making of treaties, the
appointment of ambassadors, consuls, judges of the supreme court, and
other officers of the United States whose appointment was not otherwise
provided for. As it was objected to the office of vice-president that he
seemed to have nothing provided for him to do, he was disposed of by
making him president of the Senate. No cabinet was created by the
Constitution, but since then the heads of various executive departments,
appointed by the president, have come to constitute what is called his
cabinet. Since, however, the members of it do not belong to Congress,
and can neither initiate nor guide legislation, they really constitute a
privy council rather than a cabinet in the modern sense, thus furnishing
another illustration of the analogy between the president and the
archaic sovereign.

[Sidenote: The federal judiciary.]

Concerning the structure of the federal judiciary little need be said
here. It was framed with very little disagreement among the delegates.
The work was chiefly done in committee by Ellsworth, Wilson, Randolph,
and Rutledge, and the result did not differ essentially from the scheme
laid down in the Virginia plan. It was indeed the indispensable
completion of the work which was begun by the creation of a national
House of Representatives. To make a federal government immediately
operative upon individual citizens, it must of course be armed with
federal courts to try and federal officers to execute judgment in all
cases in which individual citizens were amenable to the national law.
But for this system of United States courts extended throughout the
states and supreme within its own sphere, the federal consti