Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/242

232 could receive nothing from him, there would exist no cause for this enmity. With this legislative patronage, reputation and re-election will depend upon a crafty management of money and office; without it, both would depend on merit. In the first case, legislative testimony will be nothing but the tricks and artifices of rapacity and ambition; and sedition laws for locking up both truth and calumny, would be preferable to these tricks and artifices; under an exclusion of executive patronage, legisladve testimony as to the conduct and character of a president, would be unsuborned.

A president, with a patronage over the legislature, must have a sort of prætoriun cohorts. They will appear, and force themselves into employment, wherever an individual exists who can pay them. If a president disappoints the expectations of these legislative cohorts, he dies to the presidency; they can more safely attempt the political life of a good president, than disappointed military cohorts could the natural life of a good emperour. The motives are the same in both cases, and exactly those which draw forth from men their worst vices. Nor is there any difference between the largesses from quaternial presidents, and successive eraperours under the Roman system of military murder and election, with respect to a nation, except the result of a calculation, whether quaternial election, or irregular periodical murder, will have most effect, in exciting and spreading the corruption of executive patronage.

It is so vicious, as to deprive the patron of the power of remaining virtuous. Hence good men were suddenly changed into wicked emperours. An ability in elected emperours to corrupt an electing army, destroyed their virtues. An elective president will be himself corrupted by an ability to corrupt a legislature. Importunity will assail him. Opposition will excite him. Ambition will entice him. Avarice will harden him. Driven on by his faction, and his passions, his virtue will seldom make any resistance; its struggles will be speedily suppressed by the host of foes, with which his power of patronage over the legislature, will cause it to be assailed.