On the contrary, it was contended that a judicial responsibility to the nation, could only obtain for judges, independence of a man or body of men clothed with power. And
that the want of publick confidence, naturally attending
an absence of responsibility, with executive appointment,
promotion and patronage, and legislative accusation and
trial, would produce the dependence and partiality, deprecated by Mr. Adams, and too often displayed by experience. It is in the mode only of obtaining the same end,
that the dissertation differs from this essay.
After all it is admitted, that Mr. Adams's change of opinion, can have no influence upon the argument, except to remove the obstacle of his authority, against an impartial consideration of the question. It was a weight too heavy for a subordinate rate of talents to hear, and therefore recourse was had to a powerful auxiliary.
But facts are not altered by a change of political opinion. They continue immutable. Those asserted in his dissertation by Mr. Adams, are as true now as they were then; and they were then true, or he would not have asserted them. As they cannot be retracted, one, subversive of the ground work of his reasoning in favour of orders, is a fair and powerful argument.
"How few (says he) of the human race, have ever had any thing more of choice in government than in climate."
If this forcible exclamation is true, as it undoubtedly is, it follows, that few governments, if any, except those of the United States, have been the result of national will and intellect; and that his mountain of quotation cannot be applicable to our governments, which were produced by national will or intellect.
A transition by the United States, from force, fraud or accident, to human will and intellect, as the source of government, was the event which justified Mr: Adams in applying the terms "enlightened age" to the era of our revoIution, and in felicitating himself upon existing, at the
