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By Root 1635 0

tyranny, i.e., the ability of one or more branches to encroach upon the other(s) and to breach the overall limits set to the national government by the Constitution. Though "a dependence on the people" is the primary means of keeping government limited, Publius insists that "auxiliary precautions" like bicameralism and separation of powers are also necessary. Paradoxically, the Constitution mixes the powers of the three branches in order to keep them separate. In the famous formula of No. 51, "the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place," Publius argues, so that the officers of each department have a personal motive to exert their constitutional powers on behalf of their department’s independence. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," Publius advises, meaning that ambition must be taught to vie with ambition in defense of each branch’s rights and thus in support of the Constitution as a whole. Necessity or self-interest is thus made to coincide with duty, and statesmanlike habits are grafted onto the native stock of self-assertion.28

Experience in the states had shown that it was the legislative branch’s encroachments that were most dangerous to the Constitution, precisely because the legislature was the most powerful department in republican governments, even as the executive was naturally the most powerful in monarchical governments. Consequently, The Federalist teaches Americans that their jealousy of power ought to be directed particularly against the legislative branch, despite the fact (or rather because of the fact) that the legislature was traditionally regarded as the people’s branch. By contrast, the Anti-Federalists understood the separation of powers to cut particularly against the executive, or against energetic government in general, in the name of popular liberty or responsibility. But a central purpose of Publius’s analysis is to deprecate the legislature’s claim to belong uniquely to the people: The executive and judiciary are representative, too, he insists, because the Constitution as a whole is the people’s.

Second, Publius holds that a proper separation of powers allows each branch to perform its peculiar function well. In the discussion of the specific branches, he explains that the Constitution conduces to a deliberative legislature, an energetic executive, and a wise and just judiciary. The Anti-Federalists thought functional excellence desirable, too, but emphasized that the people must be the judge of constitutional demarcations, hence also of the character and extent of the three powers. By and large they did not think that energy ought to be the leading quality of the executive, nor that deliberative excellence as opposed to responsiveness or fidelity to the people’s will should be the mark of the legislature. To the Anti-Federalists, therefore, the new Constitution looked suspiciously like the British government redivivus, only without the effective checks and balances that it had evolved. A lofty legislature and an ambitious executive did not look to them like the government they had fought for.

Here The Federalist cautions that although it is essential to republican government that it be "derived from the great body of the society," it is sufficient that "the persons administering it be appointed, either directly or indirectly, by the people." Otherwise, every popular government "that has been or can be well organized or well executed" would be "degraded from the republican character" (No. 39, p. 237). In other words, representation is not a necessary evil but a positive good, bringing far-reaching benefits to popular government. In particular, the representative principle allows the separation of powers (originally a non-republican principle) to establish its republican bona fides, and so blesses the institutions necessary to combine energy and stability with liberty (Federalist No. 37, pp. 222–223). Republican government could not be good government without such institutions, and Publius defends them vigorously: a House of Representatives