unlimited.  It is forever varying its means and its ends.  It governs the institutions and laws and public policy of the country.  It regulates all its vast interests.  It disposes of all its property.  Look but at the exercise of two or three branches of its ordinary powers.  It levies all taxes; it directs and appropriates all supplies; it gives the rules for the descent, distribution, and devises of all property held by individuals; it controls the sources and the resources of wealth; it changes at its will the whole fabric of the laws; it molds at its pleasure almost all the institutions which give strength and comfort and dignity to society.

In the next place, it is the direct visible representative of the will of the people in all the changes of times and circumstances.  It has the pride as well as the power of numbers.  It is easily moved and steadily moved by the strong impulses of popular feeling and popular odium.  It obeys without reluctance the wishes and the will of the majority for the time being.  The path to public favor lies open by such obedience, and it finds not only support but impunity in whatever measures the majority advises, even though they transcend the constitutional limits.  It has no motive, therefore, to be jealous or scrupulous in its own use of power; and it finds its ambition stimulated and its arm strengthened by the countenance and the courage of numbers.  These views are not alone those of men who look with apprehension upon the fate of republics, but they are also freely admitted by some of the strongest advocates for popular rights and the permanency of republican institutions. * * *

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* * * Each department should have a will of its own. * * * Each should have its own independence secured beyond the power of being taken away by either or both of the others.  But at the same time the relations of each to the other should be so strong that there should be a mutual interest to sustain and protect each other.  There should not only be constitutional means, but personal motives to resist encroachments of one or either of the others.  Thus ambition would be made to counteract ambition, the desire of power to check power, and the pressure of interest to balance an opposing interest.

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* * * The judiciary is naturally and almost necessarily, as has been already said, the weakest department.  It can have no means of influence by patronage.  Its powers can never be wielded for itself.  It has no command over the purse or the sword of the nation.  It can neither lay taxes, nor appropriate money, nor command armies, nor appoint to office.  It is never brought into contact with the people by constant appeals and solicitations and private intercourse, which belong to all the other departments of Government.  It is seen only in controversies or in trials and punishments.  Its rigid justice and impartiality