Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol II).djvu/356

 348 § 882. In the next place, the power is important, as an additional security against the enactment of rash, immature, and improper laws. It establishes a salutary check upon the legislative body, calculated to preserve the community against the effects of faction, precipitancy, unconstitutional legislation, and temporary excitements, as well as political hostility. It may, indeed, be said, that a single man, even though he be president, cannot be presumed to possess more wisdom, or virtue, or experience, than what belongs to a number of men. But this furnishes no answer to the reasoning. The question is not, how much wisdom, or virtue, or experience, is possessed by either branch of the government, (though the executive magistrate may well be presumed to be eminently distinguished in all these respects, and therefore the choice of the people;) but whether the legislature may not be misled by a love of power, a spirit of faction, a political impulse, or a persuasive influence, local or sectional, which, at the same time, may not, from the difference in the election and duties of the executive, reach him at all, or not reach him in the same degree. He will always have a primary inducement to defend his own powers; the legislature may well be presumed to have no desire to favour them. He will have an opportunity soberly to examine the acts and resolutions passed by the legislature, not having partaken of the feelings or combinations, which have procured their passage, and thus correct, what shall sometimes be wrong from haste and inadvertence, as well as design. His view of them, if not more wise, or more elevated, will, at least, be