powers are vested by the Constitution.  Mr. Madison, in referring to the difficulty of providing some practical security for each against the invasion of the others, remarks that “the legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”  “The founders of our Republic * * * seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which by assembling all power in the same hands must lead to the same tyranny as is threatened by Executive usurpations.”  “In a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited both in the extent and the 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.”  “The legislative department derives a superiority in our governments from other circumstances.  Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive and less susceptible of precise limits, it can with the greater facility mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the coordinate departments.”  “On the other side, the Executive power being restrained within a narrower compass and being more simple in its nature, and the judiciary being described by landmarks still less uncertain, projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves.  Nor is this all.  As the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people and has in some constitutions full discretion and in all a prevailing influence over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments, a dependence is thus created in the latter which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former.”  “We have seen that the tendency of republican governments is to an aggrandizement of the legislative at the expense of the other departments.”

Mr. Jefferson, in referring to the early constitution of Virginia, objected that by its provisions all the powers of government—­legislative, executive, and judicial—­resulted to the legislative body, holding that “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.”  “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