Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/327

Rh by law make and enrich stockholders, the government of course becomes a paper aristocracy. It was the title op badge of the hierarchical and feudal orders in England, which by designating the members, afforded the means of limiting their progress; and if either of these aristocracies could have possessed itself, unseen of legislative power, it would have legislated itself into permanent tyranny. If our constitutions required that every stockholder should be clothed in a surplice, that he might be known and excluded from legislative power, or only allowed a portion of it, as belonging to a separate aristocratical interest, he would like the lord or the bishop, be thereby rendered less dangerous. Thus checked or balanced, these orders are considered by republicans as a bad political system; unchecked or unbalanced, even monarchists allow them to be execrable; they admit of no control without a title or badge; and the paper interest is designated by neither.

That a separate untitled interest is more powerful and dangerous than a separate titled interest, is a fact so notorious as to supersede an occasion for argument. The untitled paper interest in England, has made prisoners of the two titled orders, uses them sometimes as clerks in his counting house, at others as jackals to hunt its prey, and at all times to pronounce its will for law; this it has gradually effected, because it could act secretly; it is a warriour invisible to his adversary, or a conjurer invisible to the crowd he defrauds.

In the history of our forefathers, we recognise three political beasts, feeding at different periods upon their lives, liberties and properties. Those called hierarchical and feudal aristocracy, to say the worst of them, are now the instruments of the third. Protect us. Heaven! we exclaim, against these monsters, inert, subdued and far away from us! Oh what a beautiful creature is here! we add; upon beholding a whelp of the third, so strong as to have swam into our country across the Atlantic; and the infatuation concludes with a sincere commiseration of the people of