Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/594

tion as to the mode of preserving the selected form of government. But an analysis founded in moral principles, furnishes nations with constitutional restraints upon governments, and with perpetual sentinels faithfully warning them of the approach of their worst foes; bad laws. It transfers popular attention from the persons composing the numerical analysis, to the principles by which it is itself composed; and settles a wise veneration or a just hatred upon the good and bad divisions of these principles, instead of that ridiculous veneration for a president and a congress, a king and a parliament, or an emperor and a senate. which never discloses the approach of a single foe to liberty. A moral analysis alone can teach nations the only mode of sustaining a free government. It can detect attempts to destroy our moral constitutional principles of a division of power between the people and the government, or between the general and state governments, by political or civil laws. And it can keep us attentive to the fact, that a power in a government of any form, to deal out wealth and poverty by law, overturns liberty universally; because it is a power by which a nation is infallibly corrupted; and the legislature, whose laws caused the corruption, is at length forced by the national depravity, to abridge the liberty of the people; or an usurper makes it a strong argument, even with good men, for erecting a despotick government. A power in Congress, for instance, of influencing the wealth or poverty of states by taxing exports and making roads or canals; or of individuals, by charters; would be used by successive parties for self preservation, with an activity, by which government would exchange the duty of protecting for the privilege of regulating property. The alternative of receiving or yielding the golden fleece, according to the will of these parties, would suddenly excite an equal degree of baleful activity among the people, to gain the one and to avoid the other; and soon overturn the whole catalogue of moral principles, necessary for the preservation of a free form of government. In whatever numerical class