Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/495

Rh punish the posterior, the resolution would be abrogated by the posterior will, whenever the period of punishment should arrive. If an absolute monarch should by election constitute a power, and invest it with a right of inflicting upon his intellects, whatever political restraints and regulations this elective power pleased, the destruction of his sovereignty would follow. The fallacious idea, that election will secure sovereignty, has cheated many nations of liberty, but not a single monarch of despotism.

We must stop for a moment to explain to the reader what is meant by "political rules and regulations." If he should recollect a distinction formerly stated, between political and municipal law, he would presently discern the force of our reasoning. By one, it was said, governments are regulated; by the other, individuals. The latter species of law, comprises the whole scope of legislation, which a free nation can part with; the former, it must forever retain and pronounce, or cease to be free. The treacherous art of blending these objects is exercised by sedition laws. They profess to regulate individuals, but design to regulate the form of government. They are nominally municipal, and operatively political law. The dictator over discussion, is a dictator over decision. Volumes of cases might be cited, in which nations have gradually lost their liberty, by an insidious introduction of a political regimen, under a municipal title; and these cases forcibly recommend to the United States a wakeful memory of the solemn truth, that every government which can innovate by civil upon political law, is despotick.

The opinions under discussion, are, that the elective policy transfers sovereignty from the electors to the elected; that every act of a representative government is an act of the nation; and that the nation possesses only that imperfect and evanescent species of sovereignty, the right of suffrage.

If representation destroys that which it implies, namely, subordination, then it can annul or alter constitutions; and