This episode goes into the sixth chapter of the eleventh book — the most quoted passage of political writing produced in the eighteenth century, and among the least accurately remembered. Read to the halfway mark it says what everyone thinks it says: three powers, three sets of hands, keep them apart. Read past that point and Montesquieu dismantles both prohibitions. He does not want a permanent judiciary at all. He wants occasional tribunals of ordinary men, assembled for th

The men who opposed ratification had the small-republic doctrine, and they used it hard. Brutus opened his first essay to the citizens of New York with it; Cato used it; it was the ground of the objection the leading Anti-Federalists put first, that a territory as large as the American states together could not be governed on free principles.⁴⁶ Hamilton answered, in the ninth number, by turning to another part of the same book. The opponents of the plan, he writes, have with