tion of by judgment. For all the ends of government the Parliament is the nation. Moreover in Europe generally the sovereignty is vested visibly in some desiganted man or set of men so that the subject people can see their sovereign as well as feel the workings of his power. But in this country it has been carefully provided otherwise. In the formation of our National Government our fathers were surrounded with peculiar difficulties arising out of their novel, I may say unexampled, condition. In resolving to break the ties which had bound them to the British Empire their complaints were leveled chiefly at the King, not the Parliament nor the people. They seem to have been actuated by a special dread of the unity of power, and hence in framing the Constitution they preferred to take the risk of leaving some good endone for lack of power in the agent rather than arm any Government officer with such great powers for evil as are implied in the dicatorial charge to 'see that no damage comes to the commonwealth. "

Hence keeping the sovereingty always out of sight they adopted the plan of "checks and balances," forming separate departments of government and giving to each department separate and limited powers. These departments are co-ordinate and coequal - that is, neither being sovereign, each is independent in its sphere and not subordinate to the others, either of them or both of them together. We have three of these co-ordinate departments. Now if we allow one of the three to powers of the other two that one can control the whole Government and has in fact achieved the sovereignty.

We ought not to say that our system is perfect for its defects (perhaps inevitable in all human things) are obvious. Our farther having divided the Government into co-ordinate departments did not even try (and if they had tried would probably have failed) to create an arbiter among them to adjudge their conflicts and keep them within their respective bounds. They were left by design I suppose each independent and free to act out its own granted powers without any ordained legal superior professing the power to revise and reverse its action. And this with the hope that the three departments, mutually coequal and independent, would keep each other within their proper spheres by their mutual antagonism - that is, by the system of checks and balances to which our fathers were driven at the beginning by their fear of the unity of power.

In this view of the subject it is quite possible for the same indentical question (not case) to come up legitimately before ach one of the three departments and be determined in three different ways and each decision stand irrevocable, binding upon the parties to each case; and that for the simple reason that the departments are co-ordinate and there is no ordained legal superior with power to revise and reverse their decisions.

To say that the departments of our Government are co-ordinate is to say that the judgment of one of them is not binding upon the other two as to the arguments and principles involved in the judgment. It binds only the parties to the case decided. But if admitting that the departments of Government are co-ordinate it be still contended that the principles adopted by one department in deciding a case properly before it are binding upon another department that obligation must of necessity be reciprocal. That is, if the President by bound by the principles laid down by the judiciary so also is the judiciary bound by the principles laid down by the President; and thus we shall have a theory of constitutional government flatly contradicting itself. Depart-