Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/44

34 be sound; and whilst the aggregate by one opinion preonounces it to be in the agonies of death, the same aggregate by many opinions pronounces it to be in perfect health. Funding, banking, patronage, charter, mercenary armies and partial bounties, are each admired as a panacea by some one: even corruption is defended as a happy expedient for managing the house of commons; and doctor Balance, venerable with the rust of antiquity, excites universal astonishment by declaring with unaffected gravity, that a nobility endowed with enormous wealth, virtue and talents, is only wanting to renovate it throughout. Such doctors are labouring to patch up a policy for the United States, out of the self-same limbs, with an animal thus compounded, lying in convulsions before their eyes.

The advantage of studying the anatomy of a dead body, is the knowledge of a living one. In like manner, the usefulness of our observations in relation to the aristocracies of the first and second ages, consists in opening our way towards that of the third. A knowledge of this last, is capable of a beneficial application; whereas a knowledge of the aristocracies of superstition and the feudal system, abstracted from the light they may reflect on that of paper and patronage, is only a steril amusement.

And it was also necessary to lay the ghost of the feudal aristocracy, now conjured up only as a decoy to draw the publick attention, from its regenerated body, to come fairly to the objects of this essay; among which, an investigation of the system of paper and patronage occupies a chief place.

Preparatory to this, a political analysis is offered to the reader, as a key to the system of reasoning, subsequently to be pursued. It has already been observed, that government is founded in moral, and not in natural or physical causes. Now the moral qualities of man, being only good and evil, every form of government must be founded in that principle of the two, which prevails, like every other human action of a moral nature. This analysis is anterior to that of