Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/417

Rh lity; religion, printing and speaking, regulated by law; an unarmed militia and a standing army; or any system of legislation congenial with monarchy or aristocracy; and say if our policy would be unaltered? The change would be owing to an interpolation of political moral beings into it, taken from a class opposite to that which furnished its original materials.

It is necessary to keep in sight our policy, Mr. Adams's system, and the actual English government, to illustrate or explain the principles contended for. In all Mr. Adams's authorities, we find orders, titles or exclusive privileges in some shape; but in none, the exact and permanent balance, without which Mr. Adams's admits them to be a curse. Vicissitude, and not permanency, is their essence, as determined by experience, and a constant succession of revolulutions is the dispensation they yield. The alternation was rapid among the Italian republicks. The aristocratick scale, whilst loaded with wealth, talents, perpetuities, and superstition, preponderated against the democratick, lightened with ignorance. In England the first being unladed by alienations, and the second rendered more weighty by wealth and knowledge, an approach towards a balance begat evils, which drove that country for refuge into the aristocracy of the third age, composed of paper, patronage and armies. Experience declares, and Mr. Adams acknowledges, that the theory of balancing orders, has never generated the effects, which Mr. Adams thinks it capable of generating; whilst the theory of a division of power, for the express purpose of subjecting governments to nations, has unexceptionably succeeded in the practice of each of the states, and of the United States. This double experience defines the nature of the moral elements, both of the American and Mr. Adams's policy. Ours, by suppressing the evil principle of privileged orders, begets none of those calamities, swarming about every experiment founded in his. His, taking the balancing principle for its basis, has laboured in vain to draw good out of it, by the artifice of measur-