Thus for months, whilst doing my best at one end of the Avenue to perform my high and responsible duties to the country, has there been a committee of the House of Representatives in session at the other end of the Avenue spreading a drag net, without the shadow of authority from the House, over the whole Union, to catch any disappointed man willing to malign my character; and all this in secret conclave.  The lion’s mouth at Venice, into which secret denunciations were dropped, is an apt illustration of the Covode committee.  The star-chamber, tyrannical and odious as it was, never proceeded in such a manner.  For centuries there has been nothing like it in any civilized country, except the revolutionary tribunal of France in the days of Robespierre.  Now I undertake to state and to prove that should the proceedings of the committee be sanctioned by the House and become a precedent for future times the balance of the Constitution will be entirely upset, and there will no longer remain the three coordinate and independent branches of the Government—­legislative, executive, and judicial.  The worst fears of the patriots and statesmen who framed the Constitution in regard to the usurpations of the legislative on the executive and judicial branches will then be realized.  In the language of Mr. Madison, speaking on this very subject in the forty-eighth number of the Federalist: 

In a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited, both in the extent and duration of its power, and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength, which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions by means which reason prescribes, it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions.

And in the expressive and pointed language of Mr. Jefferson, when speaking of the tendency of the legislative branch of Government to usurp the rights of the weaker branches: 

The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government.  It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.  One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.  Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the Republic of Venice.  As little will it avail us that they are chosen by ourselves.  An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and controlled by the others.