give it no claims to favor, however they may to respect.  It stands solitary and unsupported, except by that portion of public opinion which is interested only in the strict administration of justice.  It can rarely secure the sympathy or zealous support either of the Executive or the Legislature.  If they are not, as is not unfrequently the case, jealous of its prerogatives, the constant necessity of scrutinizing the acts of each, upon the application of any private person, and the painful duty of pronouncing judgment that these acts are a departure from the law or Constitution can have no tendency to conciliate kindness or nourish influence.  It would seem, therefore, that some additional guards would, under the circumstances, be necessary to protect this department from the absolute dominion of the others.  Yet rarely have any such guards been applied, and every attempt to introduce them has been resisted with a pertinacity which demonstrates how slow popular leaders are to introduce checks upon their own power and how slow the people are to believe that the judiciary is the real bulwark of their liberties. * * *

* * * * *

* * * If any department of the Government has undue influence or
absorbing power, it certainly has not been the executive or judiciary.

In addition to what has been said by these distinguished writers, it may also be urged that the dominant party in each House may, by the expulsion of a sufficient number of members or by the exclusion from representation of a requisite number of States, reduce the minority to less than one-third.  Congress by these means might be enabled to pass a law, the objections of the President to the contrary notwithstanding, which would render impotent the other two departments of the Government and make inoperative the wholesome and restraining power which it was intended by the framers of the Constitution should be exerted by them.  This would be a practical concentration of all power in the Congress of the United States; this, in the language of the author of the Declaration of Independence, would be “precisely the definition of despotic government.”

I have preferred to reproduce these teachings of the great statesmen and constitutional lawyers of the early and later days of the Republic rather than to rely simply upon an expression of my own opinions.  We can not too often recur to them, especially at a conjuncture like the present.  Their application to our actual condition is so apparent that they now come to us a living voice, to be listened to with more attention than at any previous period of our history.  We have been and are yet in the midst of popular commotion.  The passions aroused by a great civil war are still dominant.  It is not a time favorable to that calm and deliberate judgment which is the only safe guide when radical changes in our institutions are to be made.  The measure now before me is one of those changes.  It initiates an untried experiment