Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/478

468 the artificial mind or will of orders; and because it admits mari to have derived rights from nature, as well as from law. Having rights, men, when forming governments, may relinquish or retain such as they please; and by so forming a government that the natural mind of man, shall not be controlled by the artificial mind of orders, this natural mind will be able to preserve the natural rights connected with it; whereas if this natural mind is controlled by the artificial mind or will of orders, no natural right whatsoever can remain, because there cannot exist together, a natural and an artificial sovereign.

It is important to discover the reason, why the system of orders, in every form, has invariably moulded religion into an engine for its own purposes, lest it should be imagined that this feature of that policy, might be obliterated by Mr. Adams's new idea of the responsibility of orders, as hereditary representatives.

A nation is no more a nation, after it has lost its unity, than a man would be a man, cut up into pieces. Divided into orders and interests, it is turned into several nations, separated, not by geographical boundaries, but by legal lines drawn between different privileges, or between privilege and degradation. The nations residing on each side of these legal .boundaries, will hate each other far beyond any degree of animosity, which can exist between nations geographically divided; because the legal boundaries most benefit and injure; whereas the geographical may do neither. The former create in some proportion the relation between master and slave, and excite correspondent passions; the latter are perfectly consistent with the relation between equal friends. Accordingly, nations or individuals living on different sides of geographical lines, may sometimes love each other; whilst orders on different sides of legal lines, always hate each other.

How then can Mr. Adams's idea of the responsibility of orders, save for a nation the freedom of conscience? There is no moral being, after it is divided into several moral