Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/498

488 designedly. Governments are liable to the same source of errour, and it also pours in upon them through the sluices opened by ambition, avarice, and a great variety of human vices, which sleep least under the strongest incitements to awake. To cure the propensity of human nature for vicious projects, by constituting a dictatorial power over the rights of thinking and discussing, in which the same propensity exists, in its most aggravated state, is plunging into the ocean, for fear of being drowned in a bucket of water.

We have been endeavouring to illustrate the defect of Mr. Adams's system, and of all others constituted of orders, by shewing the inefficacy and ambiguity of the sense annex. ed by them, to the expressions, "national rights and national opinion;" rights, supposed to be secured by an incapacity of acting from intellectual conviction; and opinion to be formed without thinking by a free comparison of ideas.

National rights and opinions, held or moulded at the pleasure of governments, are the creatures of a species of political transubstantiation, which declares it to be heresy, not to believe, that the opinion and will of a government, is the opinion and will of a nation. That bread and wine, are indeed flesh and blood.

National rights and national opinion, cannot really exist, without powers for defending the one, and organs for expressing the other. The system of orders must shew these or confess that they have provided for neither, and that it uses the terms as decoy phantoms to delude nations within its grasp. The policy of the United States, exhibits its militia, its right of bearing arms, its rights retained, its right of instruction, and its inclusive right of abolishing the entire government.

Our policy, considering a nation as possessing rights it cannot alienate, secures its will and ability to protect them, by moral and physical means. It provides election, attempered by free discussion, as a moral mode of subjecting governments to the sovereignty of the nation, and not