In October, 1834, in a letter to Edward Coles, Mr.Madison said, "The claim of the Senate on Constitutional ground to a share in removal as well as appointment of officers is in direct opposition to the uniform practice of the Government from its commencement.

It is clear that the innovation would not only vary essentially the existing balance of power, but expose the Executive occasionally to a total inaction, and at all times to delays fatal to the due execution of the laws." A year later, and only a few months before his death, Mr.Madison in a letter to Charles Francis Adams thus repeated his views: "The claims for the Senate of a share in the removal from office, and _for the Legislature an authority to regulate its tenure_, have had powerful advocates.

I must still think, however, that the text of the Constitution is best interpreted by reference to the tripartite theory of Government, to which practice had conformed, and which so long and uniform a practice would seem to have established.

The face of the Constitution and the journalized proceedings of the Convention strongly indicate a partiality to that theory then at the zenith of favor among the most distinguished commentators on the organization of political power." Chief Justice Marshall fortified the position of Mr.Madison, by declaring that the action of the First Congress on this question "has ever been considered as a full expression of the sense of the Legislature on this important part of the American Constitution." Of the thirty-nine members of the Convention of 1787 who signed the Constitution, thirteen, including Mr.Madison, were members of the first Congress; Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury under the new Government; and above all, General Washington, who had presided over the deliberations of the Convention, had attentively listened to every discussion, and had carefully studied every provision, was President of the United States.

More than one-third of the members of the Constitutional Convention were therefore engaged in the Executive and Legislative Departments of the new Government in applying the organic instrument which they had taken so large a part in creating.
The cotemporaneous interpretation was by those facts rendered valuable if not authoritative.