History will happily note the way sage advice in respect of President Trump’s pardons is coming from, in the New York Post, the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton. It was, after all, Hamilton who wrote 74 Federalist, urging New York to ratify the Constitution. 74 Federalist is the newspaper column that defended placing the pardon power in the president alone.

“Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate,” Hamilton wrote, “that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.”

The way Hamilton argued that the pardon power should be placed in the president alone is by pointing out that “the sense of responsibility is always strongest, in proportion as it is undivided.” So, he suggested, it could be “inferred that a single man would be most ready to attend to the force of those motives which might plead for a mitigation of the rigor of the law.”

The president alone, Hamilton added at the same time, would also be “least apt” to “shelter a fit object” of the law’s “vengeance.” The knowledge that he alone held the “fate of a fellow creature” would, Hamilton reckoned, “naturally inspire” in a president “scrupulousness and caution; the dread of being accused of weakness or connivance, would beget equal circumspection.”

No wonder the newspaper Hamilton founded is warning President Trump of the peril in his current course. The sample may be small, but close to 40% of the pardons Mr. Trump has either issued or hinted at are of persons who were on or involved with “Celebrity Apprentice.” The New York Post is warning that pardoning for personal connections is “playing with fire.”

Not that Mr. Trump is alone in this peril. President Clinton pardoned his own brother — and also his ex business partner, Susan McDougal, who went to prison rather than testify against him. On his last day in office, Mr. Clinton also pardoned two clients of Hillary Clinton’s brother, who, when that was disclosed, reportedly returned several hundred thousand dollars in fees.

Mr. Clinton pardoned Marc Rich after his wife gave donations to the Clinton library (and Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaign). That, we’ve long argued, tainted pardons that Mr. Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, nonetheless deserved on the merits. The pardons were deserved owing to prosecutorial abuse of racketeering law, of which the Wall Street Journal had long warned.

The Marc Rich pardon was also criticized because Mr. Clinton by-passed formal Justice Department procedures. Yet the Constitution doesn’t require the president to consult anyone on a pardon. The pardon, among other things, is a constitutional check and balance on abuses by the Justice Department itself and the courts. The President could bark — or tweet — a pardon over breakfast.

What this history means is that the best way for Mr. Trump to get his controversial pardons behind him is to use the pardon power not less but more. Conrad Black, himself a sage of history, keeps reminding the world that America has 5% of the world’s population and a quarter of its incarcerated individuals. That’s a scandal worse than anything the Left has laid to Mr. Trump.

Just this week, Kim Kardashian West, herself the daughter of a lawyer who spoke of being sickened whenever entering a jail, pleaded with Mr. Trump for a grandmother serving life without parole for a first-time drug offense. Good for Mrs. Kardashian West, but let Mr. Trump open up his office to many more pleadings so as to redeem Hamilton’s hope that pardoning “should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed.”