It has from the beginning been the constant aim of the leading Federalists to select some department, or some nook or corner in our political system, and to make it the depository of power which public sentiment could not reach nor the people control. The judicial was not the department which Hamilton deemed the best adapted to that end, and his opinion upon such points seldom failed to become that of his party. He liked the judiciary as well on account of its being the only branch of the Government that was constituted, in regard to the tenure of office, upon the principles he preferred, and which he had proposed in the Convention for other offices also, as on account of its usefulness in protecting the rights of persons and property against vicious legislation or lawless violence. But regarding the exercise of its powers in no other light than through its judgments in cases "in law and equity" that were brought before it by parties litigant, the only sense in which they were regarded by the framers of the Constitution, he thought it too weak a department for his purpose. This was nominally to influence, but really to control, the action of the public mind--an object which, he never hesitated to declare, could only be effected by appeals to the interests or the fears of the people, and the judicial power did not possess the means to make either effectual. This opinion of the weakness of the judicial power he frequently avowed, and particularly in the 78th No. of the "Federalist." The judiciary, he there said, "was incontestibly the weakest of the three departments of power;"--that "though individual oppression might now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people could never be endangered from that quarter;"--that it had "no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither _force_ nor _will_, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm for the efficacious exercise even of this faculty." In support of these views he cited Montesquieu, who, speaking of them says: "_Of the three powers above mentioned, the Judiciary is next to nothing._" Thus regarding the judicial department, Hamilton selected the executive and legislative as those best adapted to his purposes. Of the means which those departments possessed he spoke in the same number of the "Federalist" in the following strain: "The executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community; the legislative not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated." These were the departments, through the instrumentality of which, invigorated as he designed to invigorate them by his construction of the Constitution, he hoped to make ours a practicable government. Sustained by a Congress, a