There are two descriptions of the English Constitution which have exercised immense influence, but which are erroneous.  First, it is laid down as a principle of the English polity, that in it the legislative, the executive, and the judicial powers are quite divided—­that each is entrusted to a separate person or set of persons—­that no one of these can at all interfere with the work of the other.  There has been much eloquence expended in explaining how the rough genius of the English people, even in the middle ages, when it was especially rude, carried into life and practice that elaborate division of functions which philosophers had suggested on paper, but which they had hardly hoped to see except on paper.

Secondly, it is insisted that the peculiar excellence of the British Constitution lies in a balanced union of three powers.  It is said that the monarchical element, the aristocratic element, and the democratic element, have each a share in the supreme sovereignty, and that the assent of all three is necessary to the action of that sovereignty.  Kings, lords, and commons, by this theory, are alleged to be not only the outward form, but the inner moving essence, the vitality of the Constitution.  A great theory, called the theory of “Checks and Balances,” pervades an immense part of political literature, and much of it is collected from or supported by English experience.  Monarchy, it is said, has some faults, some bad tendencies, aristocracy others, democracy, again, others; but England has shown that a Government can be constructed in which these evil tendencies exactly check, balance, and destroy one another—­in which a good whole is constructed not simply in spite of, but by means of, the counteracting defects of the constituent parts.

Accordingly, it is believed that the principal characteristics of the English Constitution are inapplicable in countries where the materials for a monarchy or an aristocracy do not exist.  That Constitution is conceived to be the best imaginable use of the political elements which the great majority of States in modern Europe inherited from the mediaeval period.  It is believed that out of these materials nothing better can be made than the English Constitution; but it is also believed that the essential parts of the English Constitution cannot be made except from these materials.  Now these elements are the accidents of a period and a region; they belong only to one or two centuries in human history, and to a few countries.  The United States could not have become monarchical, even if the Constitutional Convention had decreed it, even if the component States had ratified it.  The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.  These semi-filial feelings in Government are inherited just as the true filial feelings in common life.  You might as well adopt a father as make a monarchy:  the special sentiment be longing to the one is as incapable of voluntary creation as the peculiar affection belonging to the other.  If the practical part of the English Constitution could only be made out of a curious accumulation of mediaeval materials, its interest would be half historical, and its imitability very confined.