Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/208

198 understanding in the discharge of this function, has been forcibly urged against the right itself. An accumulation of power in the hands of one man, bears a strong similitude to its accumulation in a single chamber. The latter, says Mr. Adams, will diffuse vice and folly throughout a nation, and corrupt election. Will the same cause purify it? It is true that the ruin of electioa proceeds from this cause, and not from an, innate disposition in the people to do themselves an injury. An accumulation of power and patronage in the hands of one man, causes candidates for popular favour to corrupt the people, in order to bring themselves within the notice of this dispenser of wealth; and candidates for executive favour to infuse into them the fatal idea, that they ought to demand of their representatives an accordance with executive will. If such effects do flow from this cause, the people are unjustly accused of a deficiency either in virtue or understanding; and the just conclusion only is, that they are not able to control the moral law of nature, which has irrevocably pronounced, that evil moral effects will flow from evil moral causes. Had we emigrated from Turkey, we might have been wedded to the opinions, that legislative power could be safely represented by one man, because it possessed bat few of the means of usurpation ; but that executive power ought to be very much divided, because it possessed many of those means. And if ambition is more likely to be excited by a considerable than by a slender capacity to gratify itself, the idea, though brouglit from Turkey, would not have been so unfavorable to civil liberty, as its converse, which has constituted executive power, the general or universal usurper of the rights of mankind.

Lord Bolingbroke observes, in his Patriot King, that the management of parliament by undertakers, was one of the most pernicious violations of the whig portion of the English form of government. It converts representation into