Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/459

Rh with the natural physical power of a nation, seasonable exertions of the first, will peaceably prevent the ruin of the other. This union is effected, by a sound militia and elective systems. The sovereign, physical and political power, being thereby inseparably united, national self government is perfectly secured. If one half of this sovereignty is tranferred to mercenary armies, and the other half to balanced orders or separate interests of any kind, they unite for mutual safety against the nation, from which both moieties are taken. Election, without her ally, a national militia, and united with standing armies, hereditary orders, or separate interests, such as banking, becomes an instrument to inflict their will. Equally unavailing to preserve liberty, is a militia, made subject to a political power beyond its influence, because such a power can disarm, neglect, and subject it to an army of its own.

A nation is both a natural and a moral being. Its natural powers we call physical, its moral, metaphysical or political. If it is deprived of its physical power, it is like a man possessed of reason, bound; if of its intellectual only, it is like a maniac, unbound. If a nation is allowed the uninterrupted possession of either, it will get the other. Yet if it loses one, it will lose both; because usurpation is never safe with one only. Therefore an attempt to deprive it of either, confesses an intention to deprive it of both. If the attempt begins with an army, it ends with destroying the political power of a nation; if it begins by assailing its political power, with orders, separate interests or corruption of any kind, it ends with an army. A man who surrenders his reason or his body to another, is soon forced to make both conformable to that other's will. To prevent mental slavery, our policy reserves to the nation intellectual rights, or the use of its reason; and to prevent physical slavery, it reserves to the nation, the military power, in an armed and organized militia I knowing that it must retain both or neither. By retaining both, a nation is a physical and intellectual being; By losing one, it becomes a being quite