Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/238

228 He who can apply fear or hope to the human mind, obtains subsciviency to his designs. A president may bestow offices and contracts upon members of congress, which excite the fears and hopes of all men; therefore he may obtain an influence over their minds, and destroy or lessen the independence of the legislature. His gradual progress in this work, and- not the constitution, will become the thermometer of his power, in which the mercury may rise and fall, until war and debt shall fix it at the English standard. And the lines drawn by the principle of a division of power may be gradually effaced, by a commerce between the departments of government, without the concurrence of the sovereign power. These lines were intended to be fixed by the constitution; and their fluctuation is as inconsistent with common honesty, as with any definite form of government.

The effect of executive influence, interwoven bylaw with a form of government, although it is disowned as one of its principles, is before our eyes in England; its effect in the United States may be estimated, by comparing the means by which it is worked there, with the means by which it may be worked here.

The chief circumstances in which the eases disagree, are the elective and hereditary qualities of the two executives: the influence of a senate over the president in the exercise of his patronage, and of a council or ministry over the king: and the ineligibility to the legislature of all officers appointed by the president, whilst a part of the officers appointed by the king are re-eligible. They agree in a common capacity for directing the artillery of executive patronage, against legislative integrity; both bestow offices created and continued, and both dispense money raised by law.

We have shewn that an annual power, by means of the disbursement of a nation's money and offices, has often enslaved it. The uncertainty of its tenure, whets its inclination to use the opportunity of acquiring one more permanent. And therefore it is more dangerous; to entrust peri-