Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/461

Rh nobles, for the contrary is the fact; but because a military is a separate interest, subsisting on the nation. The militia being nearly the nation itself, is the solitary appendage of civil power by which this principle of our policy can be en forced. If it is rendered incompetent to this end, election, a mere moral power, has no remaining ally able to save it, and hence almost every composition, constituting the code of our policy, has asserted the indispensible necessity of a well regulated militia.

The supremacy of civil power over military, is a stipulation in vindication of national self government, or a sovereignty of the people. We know that from the beginning of the world to this day, the military sovereign has universally been the civil sovereign, and therefore our policy never intended to sever civil and military power, so as to invest the people with the first, and to divest them of the second moiety of sovereignty.

Let us suppose a nation to have held both a civil and military sovereignty, one by election, and the other by an armed and trained militia; and that the latter was at length transplanted into the hands of its government, by disarming and disorganizing the militia, and raising a standing army, under any pretence whatsoever. The people retain the civil, and the government has gotten the military sovereignty. Is election without its ally, what it was with it! A nation voting under the protection of an army raised by its own government, is not a new spectacle. We see it in France. A protector is unexceptionably a master. A naked permisssion to keep and bear arms, is an insufficient ally of election or civil sovereignty. Doctor Franklin indeed used it as a resource for evading the religions scruples of a Pennsylvania assembly, but found it an inadequate defence against the feeble incursions of ignorant savages; and it would be infinitely less adequate to restrain the daring usurpations of an artful government. Without a "well regulated militia," the military sovereignty of a nation, exactly resembles its civil sovereignty under a government of