What the former can only do by successive steps (I mean subvert the laws) and through a longer or shorter train of enterprises, the latter can do in a moment. As its bare will can give being to the laws, so its bare will can also annihilate them; and, if I may be permitted the expression, the legislative power can change the constitution, as God created the light

In order, therefore, to ensure stability to the constitution of a state, it is indispensably necessary to restrain the legislative authority. But here we must observe a difference between the legislative and the executive powers. The latter may be confined, and even is the more easily so; when undivided: the legislative, on the contrary, in order to its being restrained, should absolutely be divided. For, whatever laws it may make to restrain itself, they never can be, relatively to it, any thing more than simple resolutions as those bars which it might erect to stop its own motions must then be within it, and rest upon it, they can be no bars. In a word, the same kind of impossibility is found, to fix the legislative power when it is one, which Archimedes objected against his moving the earth.

Nor does such a division of the legislature

only render it possible for it to be restrained, since each of those parts into which it is divided can then serve as a bar to the motions of the others, but it even makes it to be actually so restrained. If it has been divided into only two parts, it is probable that they will not in all cases unite, either for doing or undoing:-if it has been divided into three parts, the chance that no changes will be made is greatly increased. Nay more; 、as a kind of point of honour will naturally take place between these different parts of the legislature, they will therefore be led to offer to each other only such propositions as will at least be plausible; and all very prejudicial changes will thus be prevented, as it were, before their birth.

If the legislative and executive powers differ so greatly with regard to the necessity of their being divided, in order to their being restrained, they differ no less with regard to the other consequences arising from such division.

The division of the executive power necessarily introduces actual oppositions, even violent ones, between the different parts into which it has been divided; and that part

which in the issue succeeds so far as to absorb, and unite in itself, all the others, immediately sets itself above the laws. But those oppositions which take place, and which the public good requires should take place between the different parts of the legislature, are never any thing more than oppositions between contrary opinions and intentions; all is transacted in the regions of the understanding; and the only contention that arises is only carried on with those inoffensive weapons, assents and dissents, ayes and

noes.

Besides, when one of these parts of the legislature is so successful as to engage the others to adopt its proposition, the result is, that a law takes place which has in it a great probability of being good: when it happens to be defeated, and sees its proposition rejected, the worst that can result from it is, that a law is not made at that time; and the loss which the state suffers thereby, reaches no farther than the temporary setting aside of some more or less useful speculation.

In a word, the result of a division of the executive power is either a more or less speedy

establishment of the right of the strongest, or a continued state of war :*-that of a division of the legislative power, is either truth, or general tranquillity.

The following maxims will therefore be admitted: That the laws of a state may be permanent, it is requisite that the legislative power should be divided; that they may have weight, and continue in force, it is necessary that the executive power should be one.

If the reader should conceive any doubt as to the truth of the above observations, let him cast his eyes on the history of the proceedings of the English legislature down to our times, and he will readily find a proof of them. He would be surprised to see how little variation there has been in the political laws of this country, especially during the last hundred years; though, it is most important to observe, the legislature has been as it were in a continual state of action, and (no dispassionate man

* Every one knows the frequent hostilities that took place between the Roman senate and the tribunes. In Sweden there have been continual contentions between the king and the senate, in which they have overpowered each other by turns. And in England, when the executive power became double, by the king allowing the parliament to have a perpetual and independent existence, a civil war almost immediately followed.

will deny) has generally promoted the public good. Nay, if we except the act passed under William III. by which it had been enacted, that parliaments should sit no longer than three years, and which was repealed by a subsequent act, under George I. which allowed them to sit for seven years, we shall not find, that any law which may really be called constitutional, and which has been enacted since the Restoration, has been changed afterwards.

*

Now, if we compare this steadiness of the English government with the continual subversions of the constitutional laws of some ancient republics, with the imprudence of some of the laws passed in their assemblies, and with the still greater inconsiderateness with which they sometimes repealed the most salutary regulations, as it were, the day after they had been enacted,—if we call to mind the extraordinary means to which the legislature of those republics, at times sensible how its very power was prejudicial to itself and to the state, was obliged to have recourse, in order, if possible, to tie its

The Athenians, among other laws, had enacted one to forbid the application of a certain part of the public revenues to any other use than the expenses of the theatres and public shows.