Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/312

302 In most or all of the state constitutions, diploma, charter and corporation, are condemned as inimical to liberty, and as usurpations upon man's natural rights. In none, is a power given to the legislature, to bestow a revenue of any kind at the national expense upon corporations.

The constitution of Massachusetts declares, that "no man, or corporation, or association of men have any other title to obtain advantages or particular and exclusive privileges distinct from those of the community, than what arises from the consideration of services rendered the publick;" and that of Virginia, "that no man or set of men, are entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in consideration of publick services."

The words "common defence and general welfare," twice used in the constitution of the United States, contain the principle advanced in the two last quotations. They are the exact contraries to "particular, exclusive or separate privileges or welfare."

The constitutions quoted, literally enrolling "exclusive privileges and emoluments" in the list of tyrannies, proceed to expound the words "publick services." These only are admitted to possess a legitimate title "to exclusive privileges and emoluments." Had legislatures been left at liberty to extend these words to whatever they should deem to be publick service, they might have created and endowed with exclusive privileges and emoluments, a corporation for introducing monarchy, as well as for introducing the aristocracy of paper stock, under the idea, that it would serve the publick.

But their constitutional exposition is unequivocal. The privileges and emoluments allowed to publick services, art neither "inheritable or transmissible to children, descendants or relations," because "publick services" being "in nature" neither hereditary or transmissible, so exclusive transmissible privileges or emoluments were incompatible with the principles of liberty. This construction of the