Excerpt from Organized Efforts for the Improvement of Methods of Administration in the United States At the time the federal-constitution was adopted, more than one hundred and twenty-five years ago, the one great political problem which the men of that time felt called upon to solve was to Obtain a form Of government which, on'the one hand, would have sufficient power and be so organized that it could maintain domestic order and afford protection against foreign aggression, and yet, on the other hand, subf ject the liberty and freedom of the individual to a minimum of interference and control. The idea dominant was to keep the sphere of governmental activities as limited as possible and so to distribute the political powers that were granted that they would check or balance one another, and thus tend to prevent the assumption and exercise by any one official or branch of the government of undue authority. Compara tively little emphasis was laid upon the problem of bringing into existence an efficient system of government from the mod ern viewpoint Since it was the expectation that the govern ment would in fact have but few positive duties to perform. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.