Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/287

Rh is invested with the executive and legislative powers, or at least with part of the legislative, but does not assume the power of judging.

In the government of the kings of the heroic times, the three powers were ill distributed. Hence those monarchies could not long subsist. For as soon as the people got the legislative power into their hands, they might, as they every where did, upon the very least caprice, subvert the regal authority.

Among a free people possessed of the legislative power, a people enclosed within walls, where every thing of an odious nature becomes still more odious, it is the highest master-piece of legislation to know how to place properly the judiciary power. But it could not be in worse hands than in those of the person to whom the executive power had been already committed. From that very instant the monarch became terrible. But at the same time as he had no share in the legislature, he could make no defence against it; thus his power was in one sense too great, in another too little.

They had not as yet discovered that the true function of a prince was to appoint judges, and not to sit as judge himself. The opposite policy rendered the government of a single person insupportable. Hence all those kings were banished. The Greeks had no notion of the proper distribution of the three powers in the government of one person; they could see it only in that of many; and this kind of constitution they distinguished by the name of Polity. Rh