Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/427

Rh of election and of power, into instruments for working ends contrary to those they were intended to produce. In search of power, it destroys subordination and social order. Every civil functionary, starts up into a representative of the entire nation, none owes obedience to any other superior, and the general and constable, have an equal right with the district member, to assume the independence it bestows.

An incapacity of political law for producing the subordination of its agents to the sovereign power, would produce the same effects, as an incapacity of civil law, for producing the subordination of individuals to the government. Murder, rapine or theft, would be but badly restrained, by an advertisement to culprits, that they might wallow in wickedness for four or five years with impunity, after which the power of committing further crimes should be taken from them. Kings, though not among the wisest of sovereigns, never thought of this species of civility to deputies as a security for sovereignty. A chain of subordination from sovereign power downwards, is necessary for its preservation; and instead of snapping asunder the link between sovereignty and its highest agency, ought to be the strongest, because that agency is uniformly its destroyer, whenever a new sovereignty is erected upon the ruins of the old. Otherwise the sovereignty in its interval of torpidness, must submit to behold its agents, like Persian satraps, go to war with each other for itself. What, for instance, can preserve the rights and duties attached to the presidential agency, against Congress, but the sovereign of both? If the sovereign is unable to protect some agents against the usurpations of others, the powers of all will gradually fall under the regulation of force and corruption, and ambition or casualty will supplant compact. Even mutual corruption might cement legislative and executive power, in a league to destroy the popular sovereignty of our system, if it cannot act constitutionally at all times for its own preservation.