Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/504

494 England. In short, this pleasure may diminish or increase the information and power of this sovereignty, according to its own views; and if there should be factions, it may easily allow more freedom to one faction or portion of this sovereignty, than to another.

Such a subject sovereignty or counterfeit republicanism. is precisely that held by the people of England, France and Turkey; and that conceded to all nations by the theory of orders. Wherever such a theory becomes a government, the sovereignty of the people becomes a theory. Whether national sovereignty or self government is converted into theory by parliaments. judges. juries, prisons and Botany bay; or by national assemblies. soldiers and Cayenne; or by the koran and the sabre; all are equally the instruments of usurpation and tyranny used to repel the lashes of publiek opinion in proportion as they are merited. The English government can inflict perpetual imprisonment, in defiance of their boasted habeas corpus, without trial, upon any member of Mr. Adams's theoretical national sovereignty it pleases, should he endeavour to exercise his sovereign function, by proving, that the government was oppressive and ought to be changed; whilst his species of the sovereignty of the people, and their species of habeas corpus provision, would lie in his book, and among their statutes, as pictures of lifeless and forgotten rights.

Usurpation, perpetrated or designed, invariably resorts to sedition laws, because by suppressing discussion, it defends itself against suppression. What! Are these laws also defenders of national sovereignty or self government? Will they, like Swiss soldiers, fight equally well for spurious or for legitimate sovereignty? Will a suppression of discussion, be equally serviceable to a sovereignty which lives upon free discussion, and to one which cannot live, until free discussion is dead? Can an usurper and a nation secure sovereignty by the same code?

The friends of sedition laws will not be able to answer these questions, without first proving that freedom of