of popular rights.  The people through them obtained protection against the encroachments of the crown and the aristocracy, till in our day they are understood to be the representatives of the people, charged with the protection of their rights.  With us it was always just so.  Representation has always been of this character.  The power is with the people; but they cannot exercise it in masses or per capita; they can only exercise it by their representatives.  The whole system with us has been popular from the beginning.

Now, the basis of this representation is suffrage.  The right to choose representatives is every man’s part in the exercise of sovereign power; to have a voice in it, if he has the proper qualifications, is the portion of political power belonging to every elector.  That is the beginning.  That is the mode in which power emanates from its source, and gets into the hands of conventions, legislatures, courts of law, and the chair of the executive.  It begins in suffrage.  Suffrage is the delegation of the power of an individual to some agent.

This being so, then follow two other great principles of the American system.

1.  The first is, that the right of suffrage shall be guarded, protected, and secured against force and against fraud; and,

2.  The second is, that its exercise shall be prescribed by previous law; its qualifications shall be prescribed by previous law; the time and place of its exercise shall be prescribed by previous law; the manner of its exercise, under whose supervision (always sworn officers of the law), is to be prescribed.  And then, again, the results are to be certified to the central power by some certain rule, by some known public officers, in some clear and definite form, to the end that two things may be done:  first, that every man entitled to vote may vote; second, that his vote may be sent forward and counted, and so he may exercise his part of sovereignty, in common with his fellow-citizens.

In the exercise of political power through representatives we know nothing, we never have known any thing, but such an exercise as should take place through the prescribed forms of law.  When we depart from that, we shall wander as widely from the American track as the pole is from the track of the sun.

I have said that it is one principle of the American system, that the people limit their governments, National and State.  They do so; but it is another principle, equally true and certain, and, according to my judgment of things, equally important, that the people often limit themselves.  They set bounds to their own power.  They have chosen to secure the institutions which they establish against the sudden impulses of mere majorities.  All our institutions teem with instances of this.  It was their great conservative principle, in constituting forms of government, that they should secure what they had established against hasty changes by simple majorities.  By the fifth