But there were other materials, also, for the formation of regular and balanced governments, with nearer approaches to perfection and with far greater completeness than a mere democracy can afford to any people, however familiar they may be with the exercise and the practice of government. The people of these colonies had been so trained as to be able to apply those principles in the construction and operation of government which enable it to work freely, successfully, and wisely, while resting on a popular basis. They were able to see, that the whole of what is meant and understood by government is comprehended in the existence and due operation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers.[136] They had lived under political arrangements, in which these powers had been distributed so as to keep them for the most part distinct from each other, and so as to mark the proper limitations of each. If, in some instances, the same individuals had exercised more than one of these powers, the distinctions between the departments, and the principles which ought to regulate such distinctions, had become known. The people of the colonies, in general, therefore, saw that nothing was so important, in constructing a government with popular institutions, as to balance each of these departments against the others, so as to leave to neither of them uncontrolled and irresponsible power. In general, too, they understood, and had always been accustomed to the application of that other fundamental principle, essential to a well-regulated liberty, the division of the legislative power between two separate chambers, having distinct origins and of distinct constructions.[137] But none of these ideas were applied, or were yet thought of being applied, to the construction of a government for the United States; and it is therefore at this period that we are to observe the slow progress making, through disaster and trial, to those great discoveries which led the way to the Constitution, and that we are to mark the first of those failures by which the people of America learnt the bitter wisdom of experience. For the fate of the revolutionary government presents the first illustration in our history of the complete futility of a federative union, whose operation as a government should consist merely in agreeing upon measures in a general council, leaving the execution of those measures to the separate members of the confederacy. But this first illustration, we shall soon see, was not sufficient to establish this truth in the convictions of the American people.