Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/252

242 legislative instrument, may provoke war, introduce funding and banking, raise armies, increase taxes, multiply offices, and commit the freedom of the press to the custody of penal laws, with as much certainty and system as a British king; and add to his own power, by throwing the odium of his ambitious practices upon Congress; although, to borrow the words of the last quotation, "he durst not of himself have carried such measures into execution; or which, if supposed to he merely the, result of his own arbitrary will, would have roused the spirit of the nation to assert the rights of humanity, and the privileges of a free people."

If a president should, by an army, be rendered insubordinate to the legislature, and able to terrify them into his measures, all would agree that neither free or republican government eould possihly continue; yet its manifest atrociousness would be some cheek upon the deed. If a president is not enabled to terrify, but only to bribe or influence a legislature into his measures, what would be the difference? That between having one's wife ravished or seduced. Are not men safer against the first evil, and more frequently rendered miserable by the second?

These criticisms neither impeach the general structure of the government, nor impinge upon any local interest. No doctrine is advanced, not adhered to by state constitutions, and none condemned, to which the people have separately assented. Had they approved of bestowing monarchical powers upon an elective magistrate; of a judicial power insubordinate to the sovereignty, superior to the legislature, and subject to executive influence; or of admiting corruption into the legislature by some crooked path; an adherence to contrary principles would not have remained visible in these constitutions.

To bring the general and state governments under similar principles, would contribute to the security of the union. Hostile elements will ultimately go to war. Hence the experiments of orders in all forms have failed. Their