Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/458

448 bas no rights independent of the government. The reverse is the principle adopted by our policy. It contends, that the power of a government may be limited, and that the people may have rights independent of the government.

To assert, without enforcing this doctrine, would be equivalent to its relinquishment. Even Mr. Adams is willing nominally to admit it, in his virtual representative quality of hereditary orders. This idea is an admission of national rights independent of governments; but it confides them to the custody of the idea only. How far they have been actually secured by hereditary power, in discharge of its supposed representative duties, depends upon a fact, to which all history testifies.

Our policy, dissatisfied with an unfruitful intellectual acknowledgment of the theoretical truth of this doctrine, has sought for the means of making it practically useful. It does not rely upon the most positive verbal renunciations of absolute power, or acknowledgments of national rights, without means in the hands of the nation, adequate to their enforcement.

Here the attention of the reader is requested. We believe that one mode only of limiting the power of governments, and securing the rights of nations, within the reach of human nature, exists. To this, our policy, and no other, has resorted. Its abandonment, would be a surrender of the doctrine, and the erection of a despotism, however the government is formed; if a nation without rights, and a government without restriction, constitute a despotism. Therefore, the only existing mode of preventing it, deserves a more attentive consideration than any other human invention.

It consists simply in uniting the sovereign, physical and political power in one national interest. If any uncontrollable political power is held by a government, it will instantly seize upon an equal physical power by means of mercenary armies. But by combining the supreme political power