Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/440

430 By our policy, actual responsibility is preferred to virtual, or to speak correctly, nominal. Conscious of the danger arising from the physical force of mercenary troops, it insists upon the necessity of securing to the nation the only safe protector of moral or political power, in an armed militia; to prevent responsibility from rebelling against nations, by the same means used by monarchs and orders, to prevent nations from rebelling against them. Under the protection of the physical power of a militia, the moral or political power reserved by our policy to the people, acts legally and peaceably, by opinion and election; and the reason of the nation can have recourse to a degree of reflection and deliberation, unattainable during the confusion, the dangers, and the crimes of civil war. Without a sound militia, all popular rights, including election itself, must become tenants at will, of monarchical or aristocratical landlords.

Of the nature both of virtual and actual responsibility, no nation ever experienced evidence equally complete with our's. The multitude of cases, in which the states have enforced the latter, has given them infinitely less trouble, than any single enforcement of the former. When it shall require as much blood, treasure and misery, to remove a bad president or a bad governour, as to remove a bad king, we shall have exchanged our actual, for Mr. Adams's virtual or hereditary responsibility.

The doctrines of Mr. Adams, which have suggested several of the preceding remarks, are exhibited in the following quotations, that the reader may determine whether their construction is correct.

"It is agreed," says he, "that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties, and the only keepers who can be always trusted; and therefore the people's fair, full and honest consent to every law, by their representatives, must be made an essential part of the constitution: but it is denied that they are the best keepers, or any keepers at all of their own liberties, when they hold collec-