The Executive Power in the United States Author:Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Adolphe de Chambrun Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. CONSTITUTION OF THE EXECUTIVE POWER. WE must not for a moment lose sight of the fact that the people have not delegated all their powers to the... more » Federal Government. The latter is only sovereign within a restricted sphere of action prescribed by the Constitution. It is, then, impossible to compare it with the governments of other States. In England, Prussia, Rus- sa and France, the central power, whatever it may be, represents the whole national sovereignty, while in the United States the Federal Government only represents a part of it, and is confined to the exercise of the powers enumerated by the fundamental law. There is no necessity for presenting here the considerations which induced the Philadelphia Convention to adopt this system; but it is important to remark that it would be almost impossible for other nations to make a similar division of powers. Indeed, a country must be placed in peculiar circumstances to prevent an absorption of all authority by the general government. 'We will now look into the Constitution of the United States, and see in what manner it divides between several departments the sovereign prerogatives conferred upon the Federal Government. It creates an executive, a legislative and a judicial department, and provides that they shall be all three " co-ordinate and independent" ; or, to use the words of a decision of the Supreme Court, the several branches of the government " are co-ordinate in degree to the extent of the powers delegated to each of them. Each, in the exercise of its powers, is independent of the other, but all, rightfully done by either, is binding upon the others." l It was thus the purpose of the convention to unite the three powers in such manner that each of them might exert a constitutional control within ...« less