This is a monstrous error. Every weak power is a power doomed to perish by extinction or by usurpation. If several weak powers conflict, either one will become strong at the expense of the others, and will end in a tyranny, or they will trammel and neutralize each other, and the result will be anarchy. What is it that has constituted the strength and success of constitutional monarchy in England? It is that, while the royalty and aristocracy were originally strong, the commonalty has become strong by successive conquests of its rights from the aristocracy and the king. Of the three constitutional powers, two retain much of their primitive greatness, and rest firmly on their deep and primæval roots; the third has risen to greatness, and has gradually struck its roots deeply into the same soil. Each is fully able to defend itself against the other, and to fulfil its peculiar mission. When an earnest and sincere attempt was made to establish constitutional monarchy in France, its firmest adherents desired an ancient and historical basis for royalty; for the Chamber of Peers, an hereditary seat in the legislature, and for the Chamber of Deputies, direct election: not by any means in obedience to theories or precedents, but in order that the great powers of the state might be true powers,--efficient and living entities, not words or phantoms. In the United States, notwithstanding the difference of names, situations, manners, and institutions, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison, when founding the Republic, recognised and acted upon the same principles. They too thought it necessary to have different powers at the head of the government; and in order that the difference might be real, they gave to each of these powers--_i.e._ the two chambers and the President--a distinct origin; as distinct as the general institutions of the country would permit, and as different as their several functions. Diversity of origin and of nature is one of the conditions essential to the intrinsic and real strength of powers, and this again is the condition indispensable to political harmony and social peace.