Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/409

Rh It is by travelling from the court to the cottage, that the effects of political principles upon human happiness, can be computed. Hence, existing nations, can only confide in existing cases. The cottager has no historian to commemorate his misery, and the historian of the prince is bribed to hide it.

Soldiers and statesmen think the French and English forms of government the most perfect, because they are the most partial to their own professions; and strive to bend all freer forms towards these models best contrived for their own gratification, because that effect is the logician which defines their patriotism. The policy of the United States was contrived for advancing the prosperity of an entire society; but it cannot be preserved against the rower and arts of soldiers, statesmen, or separate interests of any kind, except by discerning the principles of government calculated to dispense general good, with the same acuteness by which the creatures of legislative partiality, discern whatever will transfer wealth and power from nations to themselves.

The moral, like the physical world, is subject to system and regularity. It is not left by Omnipotence in a state so chaotick, as that the same moral cause, should now produce good, and then evil. Men do not entrust their sheep to welves, because it is fabled that once wolves were not carniverous. The description of monarchical governments, by the minions of its frauds, or the candidates for its treasures, is entitled to the same credit as the description of the wolf in the fictions of poetry.

The fact we have assumed, lies before the senses of the reader. Let him look at the monarchies of the present age, and then at the United States. Let him listen to the groans of other regions, and the exultations of America. Let all his senses go in quest of comfort and wretchedness. Each on its return will testify "that the effects of our policy are infinitely better, than those of any other." The comparison at this time spreads over a vast variety of governments, founded in force or fraud, but exhibited in sundry modifi-