This invention of the English orders, transplanted by
blind imitation into our policy, cannot be favourable to this
policy, if it was favourable to those orders. But it may be
highly favourable to all the legal aristocracies of interest,
which may be created to subsist on the common interest, by
impeding the recovery of national rights, conveyed in charters or laws fraught with privileges like those of queen
Elizabeth. And if we should even so far violate the principles of our policy, as to reduce the people to the station
of a democratick, and to exalt all the charter or privileged
men, to that of an aristocratick order, yet self preservation
would require a negative in each upon law, as the only security against the disorders, invariably produced in the best
constructed species of political balance. It is particularly
remarkable therefore, under a system of government, acknowledging the sovereignty of the people, and reprobating
privileges and exclusive interests, that laws may be retained
against the will of this acknowledged sovereignty, after they
have been found to operate to a revolutionary extent, in
favour of the reprobated principles. If the form, by which
an anomaly so egregious has been ingrafted upon our policy,
without the concurrence of the sovereign we acknowledge,
was skillfully contrived to yield advantages to the ennobled
English orders, its introduction here is no proof of popular
acuteness; and if this device is found there to be favourable
to the sprouts from the principle of privilege or exclusive
interest, in all the modifications produced by modern manners, its partiality to the family of factitious honour, ought
not to excuse its partiality to the family of factitious wealth,
in the eyes of a sovereign who must supply it.
The numerical analysis is incompetent to the detection of real legislation, by an unconstitutional authority, under a negative ceremony; but the moral will discern with ease, that it is pregnant with effects founded in bad principles, or at least in principles adverse to those of our policy. It invests minorities and parties of interest, with a formidable power of retaining oppressive or fraudulent laws, which the
