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whether or not it is sound political science. So thoroly have 
we believed in the saving grace of this political formula that 
we have applied it to all forms of government, federal, state, 
and municipal. Within the last twenty-five years we have 
largely given up the idea when applied to municipal govern- 
ment, we are now considering how state governments may be 
reconstructed on the city manager plan in order to make them 
more efficient and more responsive to the public will, and the 
day may come when Americans will consider this theory as 
a fundamental defect in our federal government. 
That the theory of the separation of powers became so 
thoroly intrenched in American political thought was due 
largely to Montesquieu, who made his study of English political 
institutions before the cabinet system of government was per- 
fected and who transmitted to the Americans of the eighteenth 
century the misconceptions which he held regarding the Eng- 
lish government. It is a rather striking and interesting fact 
that Anglo-Saxon peoples have often made their greatest con- 
tributions to political science when they were deliberately 
trying to do the opposite of what really constituted the 
achievement. The English people were trying to bring about 
a separation of powers and prevent the growth of the Cabinet. 
Montesquieu “was only assuming as accomplished an ideal at 
which the House of Commons deliberately aimed in the early 
part of the eighteenth century”."^-^ The Cabinet was developing 
by convention rather than by law, and this made it more 
difficult to understand. For this reason also Blackstone and 
other eighteenth-century writers gave misleading accounts of 
the English government as it actually was.^® Montesquieu’s 
chief error was that he thot he saw what was not there, while 
Blackstone’s fault was that he used old terms to describe new 
political concepts. The chief mistake that the American law- 
yers of the eighteenth century made was to accept Montes- 
quieu and Blackstone at face value without any qualifications 
or mental reservations whatever. In this way the theory of 
the separation of powers found its way into American political 
^■’Albeit F. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament (London, 1920), 237. 
A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (London, 
1915), 8th ed., 8, 9. Dicey quotes at length from Blackstone’s Commentaries and then 
adds: “The language of this passage is impressive; , . . It has but one fault; the 
statements it contains are the direct opposite of the truth. . . . The terms used by 
the commentator were, when he used them, unreal, and known to be so.” 
