Note 43 — Dickinson, John. Letters of Fabius on the Federal Constitution.

Constitutional properties are only, as has been observed at the beginning of this letter, parts in the organization of the contributed rights. As long as those parts preserve the orders assigned to them respectively by the constitution, they may so far be said to be balanced: but, when one part, without being sufficiently checked by the rest, abuses its power to the manifest danger of public happiness, or when the several parts abuse their respective powers so as to involve the commonwealth in the like peril, the people must restore things to that order, from which their functionaries have departed. If the people suffer this living principle of watchfulness and controul to be extinguished among them, they will assuredly not long afterwards experience that of their “temple,” “there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”