Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/479

Rh beings of distinct interests, to enforce this respansibility. The natural mind, acting by election, is superseded by a legal mind, guided by the interest of orders.

Suppose he intends that the rights and privileges of these orders shall be settled by a constitution. This is no more than a treaty between these artificial and legal nations. And if such nations hate each other more sincerely and constantly than natural nations, treaties between them will be more frequently violated. In fact, orders never make such treaties, without instantly commencing their violation; and it is owing to the impossibility of forming a treaty which they will observe, that Mr. Adams throughout his erudite researches into their history, has found them constantly at war. It is not unnatural that he should be inflamed by the ill success of ail others, to evince his diplomatick skill in forming a new treaty; but a nation is under no such emulative impulse to become the subject of the experiment.

If orders cannot be kept from hostilities, secret or open, by didatick stipulations, can it be expected that they will forbear to use the most powerful political weapons? They are political beings themselves, and no political being, having a power to use religion as an instrument, has ever failed to exert it. The only security consists in withholding this power from political beings; but this cannot be resorted to in the case of orders, because they are sovereign themselves, and disclaim the idea of allegiance to any superior.

There being several nations intermingled together, under a treaty for securing to, and excluding privileges from each, the defence and enlargement of these privileges will be their first interest; every means will be resorted to for these ends; and the more absurd and oppressive the privileges are, the more violent and wicked will these means become. A noble nation and a plebeian nation, or a banking nation and an unprivileged nation, will necessarily terminate in an oppressing and an oppressed nation. These legal nations hate each other as mortally as white and black nations