“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power”

“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power” is a statement of popular sovereignty that supplies a foundation for the essays’ account of constitutional authority. Governmental departments hold power through a charter derived from the people; when constitutional boundaries are contested or breached, the people remain the original authority capable of declaring the charter’s meaning and requiring its observance.

Constitutional Authority and Popular Sovereignty

The phrase appears in an argument about how to address encroachments by one department upon the chartered powers of another. The departments are co-ordinate because they derive their authority from a common commission, and none can claim an exclusive or superior right to settle the limits between them. The people, as grantors of those commissions, alone possess the ultimate authority to declare the charter’s true meaning and enforce it.

That reasoning also establishes a broader principle: popular sovereignty is not only the source of government at its creation. The people remain the final constitutional reference when ordinary institutional arrangements cannot resolve a grave dispute. The argument presents this appeal as consonant with republican theory, whether government’s powers must be enlarged, reduced, or reshaped, or a department has encroached on another’s authority.

The People as the Government’s Constituents

The essays elsewhere apply this principle to the proposed national government’s enforcement of its powers. The federal government must judge in the first instance whether its measures properly execute its authority, but its constituents—the people—judge in the last. If the government oversteps its rightful bounds and uses its powers tyrannically, the people may take measures to redress the constitutional injury, as the circumstances suggest and prudence justifies.

This account does not make every disputed measure an occasion for popular intervention. It distinguishes the government’s ordinary responsibility to administer delegated powers from the people’s ultimate authority as the source of those powers. The constitutional question remains whether a law is grounded in the nature of the powers granted; examples of federal interference with state descent laws or an attempt to abrogate a state land tax are presented as clear cases of jurisdictional excess, not as legitimate federal authority.

Constitutional Means and Institutional Limits

The claim of popular authority accompanies a defense of federal powers as both limited and effective. The necessary-and-proper provision authorizes laws to execute powers vested in the national government; the supremacy provision makes supreme only federal laws made pursuant to the Constitution. Neither, in the essays’ account, grants an unlimited power to displace state authority. A federal measure outside the constitutional grant would be usurpation, not supreme law.

The same underlying logic supports the judiciary’s role in a limited Constitution. Because the Constitution specifies restrictions on legislative power, courts must be able to declare acts contrary to its manifest tenor void; otherwise, the reserved limits would have no practical effect. This judicial duty does not make the judiciary superior to the legislature: both are agents exercising delegated authority, and neither may exceed the commission. The people’s status as the ultimate source of that commission gives coherence to the distinction between lawful constitutional power and institutional usurpation.

An Extraordinary Appeal, Not a Routine Remedy

The argument recognizes the force of a proposal to summon a convention when two of the three departments, each by a two-thirds vote, judge that constitutional alteration or correction of breaches is necessary. Such a mechanism would make a route back to the people available for certain great and extraordinary occasions. Yet the essays also insist that recurring to the people cannot serve in every case as the provision for keeping the departments within their limits.

The phrase therefore names a governing premise rather than a complete procedural answer. Popular authority is ultimate, but its exercise must be reconciled with the need for workable institutions and a constitutional path appropriate to exceptional disputes. The essays place the people above the departments as the source and final judge of constitutional authority, while treating regular government and interdepartmental safeguards as necessary to preserve that authority in practice.