Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/449

Rh operate upon governours, if the nation understands its interest, at whatever degree of virtue or corruption it may be stationed, in fact or in theory.

If orders (a moral artifice) should become erupt, they are then, says Machiavel, hurtful to liberty; and he recommends one of these corrupt orders, a king, as a cure for the hurt. Bolingbroke observes, "Instead of wondering that so many kings, unfit and unworthy to be trusted with the government of mankind, appear in the world, I have been tempted to wonder that there are any tolerable;" and "a patriot king is a kind of miracle." If the moral artifice,"orders," should become corrupt, Machiavel's remedy is Bolingbroke's miracle. These are ranked among the first class of political writers. "Nothing can restrain the propensity of orders to hurt liberty, but virtue," says Machiavel. "Good kings are not to be expected by the laws of nature," says Bolingbroke. Yet they concur in favour of orders. Each decides against his own reasoning, because both being enslaved to the old tenet of the one, the few and the many, neither contemplated the abolition of orders or monarchy, nor the invention of a sound restraint upon the vices of governments, now practically illustrated in every state of the Union In fact, neither of them saw the difference between a moral artifice, and a moral principle. Bolingbroke's alternative, of an elective or hereditary monarch, is unnecessary, because both are evil moral artifices, which may be superseded by a political system, founded in good moral principles. If inconveniences appear in the United States on the election of presidents, it will only demonstrate that we have approached too near to the moral artifice, called an elective monarchy, and that we ought to recede from this bad moral artifice, nearer to the good moral principle of a division of power. Neither of these writers entertained the least idea of a policy founded in fixed and good moral principles, and have only laboured