least progress is made with the important business of legislation and the functioning of the executive and the judicial departments. Our constitution-makers, however, went even farther in preventing the concentration of the powers of government. They split up and dissipated the powers of each department among as many different offices as possible. They split up the legislative power between two chambers, each operating as a check upon the other. In Illinois they went a step farther and split up the power of the lower house by providing a method whereby every third member might be the representative of a minority party. A general check upon the power of the legislature is frequently found in the provision that it can meet for general legislative business only every two years, or that it can remain in session for such general legislative purposes only a specified number of days. The result is that the legislative power is not only hampered from without by executive and judicial vetoes and the limited time in which to act, but it is divided within among bodies which are more or less antagonistic to each other. The executive power of the state, if lodged wholly in the governor, acting through his appointees, might still have been a very extensive power, but it would have been too much power in one man to meet the approval of our constitution-makers. Hence the executive power has been split up among several independently elected executive officers, viz., the governor, the attorney-general, the secretary of state, the state treasurer, the state auditor, the state superintendent of public instruction, and the trustees of the state university. Each one of these officers is independent in the discharge of his statutory or constitutional duties. So far as they divide executive power among them, they take power from the chief executive. In the judicial department we find the same pains to give out the minimum amount of power to any single judge or group of judges. We find usually several courts of original jurisdiction, each with power to handle limited and defined classes of cases. There are justices of the peace, municipal courts, probate courts, juvenile courts, criminal courts, and circuit courts, the last having the most general jurisdiction. Then follow a succession of appellate tribunals, each with a limited jurisdiction to hear appeals. The trial judges have had their power restricted by being forbidden to exercise any control over juries by oral instructions upon the law. They have no power to give any instructions upon the evidence. They have been reduced in jury trials to the position of umpires for forensic duels between lawyers. In the appellate tribunals they are usually forbidden to review questions of fact. Their function is confined very narrowly to the affirming of the decision below, or reversing it without remanding it, or reversing and remanding it for a new hearing. They are denied any power of hearing further evidence