Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol II).djvu/43

 CH. VIII.] § 554. The value, then, of a distribution of the legislative power, between two branches, each possessing a negative upon the other, may be summed up under the following heads. First: It operates directly as a security against hasty, rash, and dangerous legislation; and allows errors and mistakes to be corrected, before they have produced any public mischiefs. It interposes delay between the introduction, and final adoption of a measure; and thus furnishes time for reflection; and for the successive deliberations of different bodies, actuated by different motives, and organized upon different principles.

§ 555. In the next place, it operates indirectly as a preventive to attempts to carry private, personal, or party objects, not connected with the common good. The very circumstance, that there exists another body clothed with equal power, and jealous of its own rights, and independent of the influence of the leaders, who favour a particular measure, by whom it must be scanned, and to whom it must be recommended upon its own merits, will have a silent tendency to discourage the efforts to carry it by surprise, or by intrigue, or by corrupt party combinations. It is far less easy to deceive, or corrupt, or persuade two bodies into a course, subversive of the general good, than it is one; especially if the elements, of which they are composed, are essentially different.

§ 556. In the next place, as legislation necessarily acts, or may act, upon the whole community, and involves interests of vast difficulty and complexity, and requires nice adjustments, and comprehensive enactments, it is of the greatest consequence to secure an independent review of it by different minds, acting under different, and sometimes opposite opinions and