necessary, aids to virtue, the public service may have no other security than their uncertain impulses or imperfect judgments. In the midst of such tendencies to opposite mischiefs, all that human wisdom and foresight can do is, to anticipate and prevent the evils of both extremes, by provisions which will guard both the interests of morality and the interests of political expediency as completely as circumstances will allow. I am persuaded it was upon such principles as I have thus endeavored to state, that the framers of our national Constitution intended to regulate this very difficult part of the relations between the executive and the legislature. During a considerable period, however, of their deliberations on the disabilities to which it would be proper to subject the members of the latter department, they had another example before them besides that afforded by the history of parliamentary corruption in England. The Congress of the Confederation had of course the sole power of appointment to offices under the authority of the United States; and although there is no reason to suppose that body at any time to have been justly chargeable with corrupt motives, there were complaints of the frequency with which it had filled the offices which it had created with its own members. In these complaints, the people overlooked the justification. They forgot that the nature of the government, and the circumstances of the country, rendered it difficult for an assembly which both made and filled the offices, and which exercised its functions at a time when the State governments absorbed by far the greater part of the interests and attention of their citizens, to find suitable men out of its own ranks. In that condition of things, it might have been expected,--and it implies no improper purpose,--that offices would be sometimes framed or regulated with a view to their being filled by particular persons. But the complaints existed;[170] the evil was one that tended constantly to become worse; and, in framing the new government, this was the first aspect in which the influence of office and its emoluments presented itself to the Convention.