I accept, therefore, the traditional notion that the separation of the judicial from the executive power, the right of the former to determine the legality of executive decision, is the basis of freedom. I do not, however, believe that the separation of the executive from the legislature is either necessary or desirable. The origin of the idea, as you know, is in the historic misinterpretation of the British Constitution by Montesquieu;[13] and this, in its turn, was due to his misapplication of certain classic dicta of Locke.[14] The fact is that a separation in this realm results in a complete and undesirable erosion of responsibility. The British system, in which the executive, as a committee of the legislative, formulates its plans for acceptance or rejection, has, I think, the clear advantage of showing the electorate exactly where responsibility for action must lie. Where mistakes are made, where there is corruption, or dishonesty, or abuse, it can be brought home forthwith to its authors. In the American system, that is not the case. The President is neither the master nor the servant of the legislature. The latter can make its own schemes; where its views, more, where its party complexion, are different from his, there is a constant tendency to paralysis of administration. Each can blame the other for failure. No clear policy emerges upon which the electorate can form a straightforward judgment. Independence makes for antagonism and antagonism, in its turn, makes for confusion. Such a separation means, almost invariably, the construction of a separate quasi-executive in the legislature, which has an interest of its own distinct from, and often hostile to, that of the President.[15] I can see no necessary safeguard of liberty in this. On the contrary, the British system, where the executive may be at any moment destroyed by the legislature as a penalty for error or wrong, where, also, there lies always the prospect of an immediate and direct appeal to the people as the ultimate and only arbiter of difference, seems to me far more satisfactory. IV Another institutional mechanism for the safeguarding of freedom is that of a Bill of Rights. Certain principles, freedom of speech, protection from arbitrary arrest, and the like, are regarded as especially sacred. They are enshrined in a document which cannot, constitutionally, be invaded either by the legislature or the executive, save by a special procedure to which access is difficult. The first Amendment to the American Constitution, for example, lays it down that Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech; and any Act of Congress which touches upon the matter can be challenged for unconstitutionality before the Supreme Court. The Amendment, moreover, cannot be attacked save by the usual process of constitutional change in America; and that means that, except in the event of an American Revolution, it is unlikely ever to be directly attacked at all.