Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/165

Rh capable of intimidating; that the system of paper and patronage did not exist to corrupt; and that we had no monarchy or aristocracy, to corrupt election and buy despotism with publick money. It does not weaken the force of these observations to urge, that Mr. Adams chiefly refers in this part of the extract, to (hearts and practices of the English system, in assailing ours. For he thereby debases that, and exalts ours, by allowing one to be a system, lilted for these vicious practices, and the other, fitted to resist them; and he also admits that effects ensued, in the absence of causes propelling to these vices, differing from those which their presence produces; of coarse such causes were not interwoven with our government.

Our own governments, however, were exclusively the evidence of the following declaration; "those intrepid assertors of the rights of mankind, whose philosophy and policy have enlightened the world, in twenty years, move than it was ever before enlightened in many centuries, by ancient schools or modern universities." In what did this modern light, or the previous darkness consist? Will a mixture of the ignorance of many centuries, with this enlightened policy, so recently invented, obscure, or render it more splendid? In short, why has Mr. Adams, neglecting the wonderful discoveries of this modern philosophy in favour of human rights, arrayed against it a cloud of quotations, chiefly collected from the deepest tints of ancient obscurity? Was it to explain, impress and accelerate a philosophy and policy, which had advanced mere rapidly in twenty years than the philosophy and policy comprising his references had in twenty centuries?

The old school of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy is at issue with the new school, of modifying government with an aspect to moral qualities, and not to numerical orders. Mr. Adams's efforts and praises appear on the side of the new school; his treatise, and his proposal to extinguish the light of our policy, so dazzling in 1789, on the side of the old; like the strokes of father and sun taking differ-