ordinary statutory provisions are crowded, have to be changed from year to
year. The peculiar and essential qualities of the government established by
the Constitution are:

First, it is representative.

Second, it recognizes the liberty of the individual citizen as
distinguished from the total mass of citizens, and it protects that liberty
by specific limitations upon the power of government.

Third, it distributes the legislative, executive and judicial powers, which
make up the sum total of all government, into three separate departments,
and specifically limits the powers of the officers in each department.

Fourth, it superimposes upon a federation of state governments, a national
government with sovereignty acting directly not merely upon the states, but
upon the citizens of each state, within a line of limitation drawn
between the powers of the national government and the powers of the state
governments.

Fifth, it makes observance of its limitations requisite to the validity of
laws, whether passed by the nation or by the states, to be judged by the
courts of law in each concrete case as it arises.

Every one of these five characteristics of the government established by
the Constitution was a distinct advance beyond the ancient attempts at
popular government, and the elimination of any one of them would be a
retrograde movement and a reversion to a former and discarded type of
government. In each case it would be the abandonment of a distinctive
feature of government which has succeeded, in order to go back and try