but so long as we have an independent judiciary, the great interests of the people will be safe.  Neither the president, nor the legislature, can violate their constitutional rights.  Any such attempt would be checked by the judges, who are designed by the constitution to keep the different branches of the government within the spheres of their respective orbits, and say thus far shall you legislate, and no further.  Leave to the people an independent judiciary, and they will prove that man is capable of governing himself,—­they will be saved from what has been the fate of all other republics, and they will disprove the position that governments of a republican form cannot endure.

We are asked by the gentleman from Virginia, if the people want judges to protect them?  Yes, sir, in popular governments constitutional checks are necessary for their preservation; the people want to be protected against themselves; no man is so absurd as to propose the people collectedly will consent to the prostration of their liberties; but if they be not shielded by some constitutional checks, they will suffer them to be destroyed—­to be destroyed by demagogues, who at the time they are soothing and cajoling the people, with bland and captivating speeches, are forging chains for them; demagogues who carry, daggers in their hearts, and seductive smiles in their hypocritical faces, who are dooming the people to despotism, when they profess to be exclusively the friends of the people; against such designs and such artifices, were our constitutional checks made, to preserve the people of this country.

* * * * *

=_Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826._= (Manual, pp. 486, 490.)

From his “Inaugural Address”, March 4th, 1801.

=_61._= ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe, too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others, possessing a chosen country with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation, entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth but from our actions and their sense of them, enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practised, in various forms, yet all of them including honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people?  Still one thing more, fellow-citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.  This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.