such limitations there can be no security for liberty.  If, whatever great officer of state happens to be the most forceful, skillful, and ambitious, is permitted to overrun and absorb to himself the powers of all other officers and to control their action, there ensues that concentration of power which destroys the working of free institutions, enables the holder to continue himself in power, and leaves no opportunity to the people for a change except through a revolution.  Numerous instances of this very process are furnished by the history of some of the Spanish-American republics.  It is of little consequence that the officer who usurps the power of others may design only to advance the public interest and to govern well.  The system which permits an honest and well-meaning man to do this will afford equal opportunity for selfish ambition to usurp power in its own interest.  Unlimited official power concentrated in one person is despotism, and it is only by carefully observed and jealously maintained limitations upon the power of every public officer that the workings of free institutions can be continued.

The rigid limitation of official power is necessary not only to prevent the deprivation of substantial rights by acts of oppression, but to maintain that equality of political condition which is so important for the independence of individual character among the people of the country.  When an officer has authority over us only to enforce certain specific laws at particular times and places, and has no authority regarding anything else, we pay deference to the law which he represents, but the personal relation is one of equality.  Give to that officer, however, unlimited power, or power which we do not know to be limited, and the relation at once becomes that of an inferior to a superior.  The inevitable result of such a relation long continued is to deprive the people of the country of the individual habit of independence.  This may be observed in many of the countries of Continental Europe, where official persons are treated with the kind of deference, and exercise the kind of authority, which are appropriate only to the relations between superior and inferior.

So the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, after limiting the powers of each department to its own field, declares that this is done “to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

The third class of limitations I have mentioned are those made necessary by the novel system which I have described as superimposing upon a federation of state governments, a national government acting directly upon the individual citizens of the states.  This expedient was wholly unknown before the adoption of our constitution.  All the confederations which had been attempted before that time were simply leagues of states, and whatever central authority there was derived its authority from and had its relations with the states as separate bodies politic.  This was