feeling, reasoning and acting like, and being an exact portrait in miniature. of the people at large.
Mr. Adams's later system is bottomed upon orders, two of them hereditary, incapable of thinking, feeling, reasoning or acting like the people at large; and yet exercising a complete sovereignty, as in England.
The dissertation contends for the frequency of election, its application even to executive power, for securing its responsibility; and the infallible truth of the maxim, that "where annual elections end, there slavery begins."
The system renounces two thirds of the principle of election for hereditary orders, and advocates the idea of unelected virtual representatives, never to mix with the people, account for their stewardship, or be,
"Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,
"To rise, to break, and to that sea return."
And asserts that elections ought to be rare; that they produce every vice; and that they bring the worst men into power.
Both in the dissertation and the system, the impolicy of accumulating all civil power in one assembly is justly insisted on. In the first, election is considered as sufficient to produce a division of power; and the people, as being able to split their agencies, and not compelled to consolidate them into one mass. In the second, hereditary orders are eulogized as the only remedy for such a political evil. The argument used against a single assembly is, that it is liable to all the vices, follies and frailties of an individual." Or, in other words, like a king. Then a king or an individual must be liable to all the "vices, follies and frailties" of a single assembly. Mr. Adams was forced to use one of these political beings, as a mirror to reflect the deformity of the other. But forgetting their similitude, he becomes in his system the admirer of that, selected in his dissertation to exhibit a single assembly in an execrable light.
