more respectable adversaries to the Constitution, is its supposed violation of the political maxim that the legislative, executive and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct. In the structure of the Federal Government no regard, it is said, seems to have been paid to this essential precaution in favor of liberty. The several departments of power are distributed and blended in such a manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disproportionate weight of other parts. "No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the Federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with this accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system".... In No. 48, speaking of the three great departments, he says: "It is equally evident that neither of them ought to possess, directly or indirectly, an overruling influence over the others in the administration of their respective powers." ... In No. 49, he notices a proposition of Mr. Jefferson to authorize a Convention upon a call of two of the three departments, for "altering the Constitution or correcting breaches of it," and says,--"The several departments being perfectly coördinate by the terms of their common commission, neither of them, it is evident, can pretend to an exclusive or superior right of settling the boundaries between their respective powers." He then goes on to urge objections to too frequent appeals to the people in that form, and sustains the opinion that it would be better to rely on other safeguards against encroachments which he details. In Nos. 78 and 81, General Hamilton, admitting that "there is no liberty where the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," shows at great length the comparative weakness of the judicial power, and the very slight probability that "the general liberty of the people can ever be endangered from that quarter."