Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/144

 with a marked principle, moral and political, and conceived and held up by the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every new irritation will make it deeper and deeper."

But it seems clear to me that if slavery had never existed, a community divided by principles so opposite as those of Jefferson and Hamilton will be distracted by their antagonism until one of them shall prevail; and that a theory that identifies liberty with a single right, the right of doing all that you have the actual power to do, and a theory which secures liberty by certain unalterable rights, and founds it on truths which men did not invent and may not abjure, cannot both be formative principles in the same Constitution. Absolute power and restrictions on its exercise cannot exist together. It is but a new form of the old contest between the spirit of true freedom and despotism in its most dexterous disguise. One scene I often look back upon, for it appears to me to contain the key of that which followed. I was sometimes present at the debates of a Convention which met at Boston after an interval of thirty years to revise the Constitution of the most enlightened State of the Union. There were treated some of the first principles of politics, and one of the questions was as to the appointment of the judiciary. It is quite an elementary truth that a judge should be independent, and saved from the danger of being influenced by the favour of either the court or the people. But an eminent and highly cultivated orator, now one of the first of American statesmen, now perhaps quite the first in European fame, spoke in favour of short, I believe annual, terms of office, and for the election of the judges by the people. He did not dispute that the laws would be more honourably and faithfully administered by independent judges. But he maintained that consistency is better than justice, that the people, as the source of all authority, ought to control those to whom they delegate it, and that no argument from expediency ought to be allowed to disturb the application of the Democratic principle. I could not help remembering that there is also a principle of absolute