Personal Government is autocratic. It is the One-Man Power elevated
above all else, and is therefore in direct conflict with republican
government, whose consummate form is tripartite, being executive,
legislative, and judicial,--each independent and coëqual. From Mr.
Madison, in “The Federalist,” we learn that the accumulation of
these powers “in the same hands” may justly be pronounced “the very
definition of Tyranny.”[47] And so any attempt by either to exercise
the powers of another is a tyrannical invasion, always reprehensible
in proportion to its extent. John Adams tells us, in most instructive
words, that “it is by balancing each of these powers against the other
two that the efforts in human nature towards tyranny can alone be
checked and restrained, and any degree of freedom preserved in the
Constitution.”[48]
Then, again, the same authority says that the perfection of this
great idea is “by giving each division a power to defend itself by a
negative.”[49] In other words, each is armed against invasion by the
others. Accordingly, the Constitution of Virginia, in 1776, famous
as an historical precedent, declared expressly: “The legislative,
executive, and judiciary departments shall be separate and distinct, so
that neither exercise the powers properly belonging to the other; nor
shall any person exercise the powers of more than one of them at the
same time.”[50]
The Constitution of Massachusetts, dating from 1780, embodied the same
principle in memorable words: “In the government of this Commonwealth,
the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and
judicial powers, or either of them; the executive shall never exercise
the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them; the judicial
shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of
them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”[51]
A government of laws and not of men is the object of republican
government; nay, more, it is the distinctive essence without which it
becomes a tyranny. Therefore personal government in all its forms,
and especially when it seeks to sway the action of any other branch
or overturn its constitutional negative, is hostile to the first
principles of republican institutions, and an unquestionable outrage.
That our President has offended in this way is unhappily too apparent.