Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/158

148 violence, such a convention may still prevent the first magistrate from bacoming absolute, as well as hereditary." Nedham had also said "that it is but reason that the people should see that none be interested in the supreme authority, bat persons of their own election, and such as must in a short time, return again into the same condition with themselves." In answer to which, Mr. Adams observes, that "the Americans have agreed with this writer in this sentiment. This hazardous experiment they have tried, and if elections are soberly made, it may answer very well; but if parties, factions, drunkenness, bribes, armies and delirium, come in, as they always have done sooner or later, to embroil and decide every thing, the people must again have recourse to conventions, and find a ready. Neither philosophy nor policy has yet discovered any other cure, than by prolonging the duration of the first magistrate and senators. The evil may be lessened and postponed, by elections for longer periods of years, till then come for life; and if this is not found an adequate remedy, there will remain no other but to make them hereditary. The delicacy or the dread of unpopularity, that should induce any man to conceal this important truth from the full view and contemplation of the people, would be a weakness, if not a vice."

The reader now perceives the necessity of considering election, as operating independently, or under the influence of hereditary orders ; because if it is more vicious in the latter situation than in the former, Mr. Adams's proposal to amend a less vicious elective system, by substituting for it one more so, is undoubtedly precipitate and erroneous. Election has been universally in the supposed vicious state, previously to the experiment of the United States, and from this vicious state Mr. Adams has drawn his inferences. At this moment it exists in the United States unconnected, and in England, connected, with hereditary orders; in the two situations between which a distinction has been attempted.