Would that these things could be forgotten! but since through officious friends the President insists upon a second term, they must be considered and publicly discussed. When understood, nobody will vindicate them. It is easy to see that Cæsarism even in Europe is at a discount, that “personal government” has been beaten on that ancient field, and that “Cæsar with a Senate at his heels” is not the fit model for our Republic. King George the Third of England, so peculiar for narrowness and obstinacy, had retainers in Parliament who went under the name of “The King’s Friends.” Nothing can be allowed here to justify the inquiry, “Have we a King George among us?”--or that other question, “Have we a party in the Senate of ‘The King’s Friends’?”
Personal Government is autocratic. It is the One-Man Power elevated above all else, and is therefore in direct conflict with republican government, whose consummate form is tripartite, being executive, legislative, and judicial,--each independent and coëqual. From Mr. Madison, in “The Federalist,” we learn that the accumulation of these powers “in the same hands” may justly be pronounced “the very definition of Tyranny.”[47] And so any attempt by either to exercise the powers of another is a tyrannical invasion, always reprehensible in proportion to its extent. John Adams tells us, in most instructive words, that “it is by balancing each of these powers against the other two that the efforts in human nature towards tyranny can alone be checked and restrained, and any degree of freedom preserved in the Constitution.”[48]
Then, again, the same authority says that the perfection of this great idea is “by giving each division a power to defend itself by a negative.”[49] In other words, each is armed against invasion by the others. Accordingly, the Constitution of Virginia, in 1776, famous as an historical precedent, declared expressly: “The legislative, executive, and judiciary departments shall be separate and distinct, so that neither exercise the powers properly belonging to the other; nor shall any person exercise the powers of more than one of them at the same time.”[50]
The Constitution of Massachusetts, dating from 1780, embodied the same principle in memorable words: “In the government of this Commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them; the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them; the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”[51]