Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/248

238 to executive patronage, in imitation of the English precedent; and assert its falsehood, by prohibiting accumulations of offices. And though the president remains isolated between our affirmative and negative, we have copied it in a mode excessively increasing its malignity, first by the ineligibility which loses the purchase the instant it is paid for; secondly, by the necessity for fresh means to corrupt or influence such talents, as may appear after the best are transplanted; and thirdly, by the removal of the highest virtue and the best talents from the department, upon which the liberty and prosperity of nations must for ever depend. Ingeniously providing both a constant drain for publick treasure, and a constant drain of talents and virtue from legislatures; and managing to extract from the evil principle of exposing them to the patronage of one man, the evil effects both of stupifying and demoralizing them, one of which has sufficed for the nation we have imitated.

Let us consider the following extract from a late English author. "But the history of this reign," that of Henry the 8th, "yields other lessons than those of a speculative morality; lessons which come home to the breast of every English man, and which he ought to remember every moment of his existence. It teaches us the most alarming of ail political truths. That absolute despotism may prevail in a state, and yet the form of a free constitution remain. Nay, it even leads us to a conjecture still more interesting to Britons, that in this country an ambitious prince may most successfully exercise his tyrannies under the shelter of those barriers. which the constitution has placed as the security of national freedom. Henry changed the national religion, and, in a great measure, the spirit of the laws of England. He perpetrated the most enormous violences against the first men in the kingdom: he loaded the people with oppressive taxes, and he pillaged them by loans, which it was known he never meant to pay; but he never attempted to abolish the parliament, or even to retrench any of its doubtful privileges