If this reasoning is true, all aristocracies of interest, military, stock, ministerial, or party, whether created by laws
literally constitutional, by a patronage equally warranted,
or by the struggles between the inns and outs under less
faithful denominations, for the powers and profits of government, being hostile to the true principles of our policy,
are really treasonable, and would at once appear to be so, if
they were compared with the moral principles by which the
constitution was constructed, and the end it had in view.
Upon the same ground, the great legislative power bestow-
ed by most of the state constitutions, would not suffice to
justify the destruction of the primary end of these constitutions themselves, by any laws, however justifiable by their
letter. The state and the general constitutions form but
one system of policy. The spirit of this policy, to be only
fairly drawn from an inspection of the whole, is adverse to
aristocracy in every form, because it is not itself an aristocratical spirit. All laws driving into our policy any portion
of this new spirit, will drive out a correspondent portion of
the old. But we are not left to infer from the general
structure of those instruments from which we deduce our
policy, whether its end was aristocratical or not. Titles,
exclusive privileges or advantages, so as to comprise completely the ideas of personal and pecuniary aristocracies in
all forms, are every where exclaimed against, for the purpose of closing the legislative door against all such modes
of destroying our policy. And the success with which
these positive inhibitions have been hitherto gotten over, by
the constructions of parties of interest in some form, serves
to demonstrate both the inefficacy of political law to restrain
such parties, and the necessity for ascertaining the principles
which constitute a good or a bad government, as a test to
which the people may resort for discovering the tendency
of civil law.
The laws for making that which was purchased for one shilling worth twenty, and for making these twenty worth thirty or forty, as stock in the bank of the United States:
