f the society by an unjust and tyrannical act of legislation,
should escape with impunity, more than two thirds of the Senate,
sacrificing the same interests in an injurious treaty with a foreign
power? The truth is, that in all such cases it is essential to the
freedom and to the necessary independence of the deliberations of the
body, that the members of it should be exempt from punishment for acts
done in a collective capacity; and the security to the society must
depend on the care which is taken to confide the trust to proper hands,
to make it their interest to execute it with fidelity, and to make it
as difficult as possible for them to combine in any interest opposite to
that of the public good.

So far as might concern the misbehavior of the Executive in perverting
the instructions or contravening the views of the Senate, we need not
be apprehensive of the want of a disposition in that body to punish the
abuse of their confidence or to vindicate their own authority. We may
thus far count upon their pride, if not upon their virtue. And so far
even as might concern the corruption of leading members, by whose arts
and influence the majority may have been inveigled into measures
odious to the community, if the proofs of that corruption should be
satisfactory, the usual propensity of human nature will warrant us in
concluding that there would be commonly no defect of inclination in
the body to divert the public resentment from themselves by a ready
sacrifice of the authors of their mismanagement and disgrace.

PUBLIUS

1. In that of New Jersey, also, the final judiciary authority is in
a branch of the legislature. In New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, one branch of the legislature is the
court for the trial of impeachments.

FEDERALIST No. 67

The Executive Department

From the New York Packet. Tuesday, March 11, 1788.

HAMILTON

To the People of the State of New York:

THE constitution of the executive department of the proposed government,
claims next our attention.

There is hardly any part of the system which could have been attended
with greater difficulty in the arrangement of it than this; and there
is, perhaps, none which has been inveighed against with less candor or
criticised with less judgment.

Here the writers against the Constitution seem to have taken pains
to signalize their talent of misrepresentation. Calculating upon the
aversion of the people to m