And after all, what necessity was there for confiding this vast power to the Senate, opening the door of a small body to the corruption and intrigue for which the magnitude of the prize to be gained and to be given, and the facility for their exercise, would furnish an enormous temptation? Was it so necessary that the States should force their equality of privilege and of power into every department of the Constitution, making it felt not only in all acts of legislation, but in the whole administration of the executive and judicial duties? Was nothing due to the virtue and sense and patriotism of a majority of the people of the United States? Might they not reasonably be expected to constitute a body of electors, who, chosen for the express purpose, and dissolved as soon as their function had been discharged, would be able to make an upright and intelligent choice of a chief magistrate from among the eminent citizens of the Union? Questions like these, posterity would easily believe, without the clear record that has descended to them, must have anxiously and deeply employed the framers of the Constitution. They were to consider, not only what was theoretically fit and what would practically work with safety and success, but what would be accepted by the people for whom they were forming these great institutions. That people undoubtedly detested everything in the nature of a monarchy. But there was another thing which they hated with equal intensity, and that was an oligarchy. Their experience had given them quite as much reason for abhorring the one as the other. Such, at least, was their view of that experience. A king, it is true, was the chief magistrate of the mother country against which they had rebelled, against which they had fought successfully for their independence. The measures that drove them into that resistance were executed by the monarch; but those measures were planned, as they believed, by a ministry determined to enslave them, and were sanctioned by a Parliament in which even the so-called popular branch was then but another phase of the aristocracy which ruled the empire. The worst enemy our grandfathers supposed they had in England, throughout their Revolution, was the ministerial majority of that House of Commons, made up of placemen sitting for rotten boroughs, the sons of peers, and the country gentlemen, who belonged to a caste as much as their first-cousins who sat by titles in the House of Lords. Our ancestors did not know--they went to their graves without knowing--that in the hard, implacable temper of the king, made harder and more implacable by a narrow and bigoted conscientiousness, was the real cause for the persistency in that fatal policy which severed these Colonies from his crown.