utive, and judiciary
departments ought to be separate and distinct. In the structure of the
federal government, no regard, it is said, seems to have been paid to
this essential precaution in favor of liberty. The several departments
of power are distributed and blended in such a manner as at once to
destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the
essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the
disproportionate weight of other parts.

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is
stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than
that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers,
legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of
one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective,
may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the
federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation
of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to
such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire
a universal reprobation of the system. I persuade myself, however,
that it will be made apparent to every one, that the charge cannot
be supported, and that the maxim on which it relies has been totally
misconceived and misapplied. In order to form correct ideas on this
important subject, it will be proper to investigate the sense in which
the preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of
power should be separate and distinct.

The oracle who is always consulted and cited on this subject is the
celebrated Montesquieu. If he be not the author of this invaluable
precept in the science of politics, he has the merit at least of
displaying and recommending it most effectually to the attention of
mankind. Let us endeavor, in the first place, to ascertain his meaning
on this point.

The British Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the
didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work
of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and
rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works
were to be judged, so this great political critic appears to have
viewed the Constitution of England as the standard, or to use his own
expression, as the mirror of political liberty; and to have delivered,
in the form of elementary truths, the severa