Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/253

Rh adverse principles have never been able to subsist peaceably together for any considerable time. Influence and insubordination are the contraries of division and responsibility; and the same effects are produced by compounding a government of opposite and hostile orders of principles, as of hostile orders of men; because a contrariety in principles causes the hostility among orders.

This contrariety is the test to establish the sufficiency of our analysis for defining governments by moral principles, and enabling us to foresee effects. We have, for instance, considered division of power, responsibility and legislative purity (one side of a contrariety) as good, and as producing good effects; and monopoly, insubordination and corruption (the other side) as evil, and as producing evil effects; and deduced from these considerations the reasoning of this part of our essay. The mode of applying our definition to particular eases consists merely in stating plain questions. For an instance. Is the power of die president to influence the popular representatives, or the power of the government to neglect the militia, and use standing armies, good or evil, monarchical or republican, or congenial with the policy of the United States or of England, or of both? Is the policy of these countries the same?