Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/515

Rh are nations. When several of these are associated for some ends, and unassociated for others, distinct orders of political beings exist, created by distinct associations. Our policy provides organs to bestow efficacy on the opinions of both, because their existence itself can only be known or preserved by their opinions; and the senate was made the organ of those moral beings called states, to prevent the separate social existence of each, from being swallowed up by a society of all. The people have constituted themselves into two associations; of states, and of their union. As these moral or political beings, infuse in- to our government its spirit, one for some purposes, the rest for others; and as all of them are composed of the same intellectual beings; a construction which supposes, that our policy expected both democratical and aristocratical influence to proceed from the same intellectual source, is as unphilosophical, as to expect hot and cold breath at the same time, from the same nostril. Separate interests only, and not national opinion, can furnish a government with opposite and contending impulses. If the states are not aristocratical beings, how can they produce an aristocratical being?

It is as foreign to the intention of our policy, to create a monarel as an aristocracy. The president is the compound creature of the equality of states and the equality of man, both of which are infused into the mode of his election, for the purpose of preserving both; and in his legislative capacity, he is equally exposed to the control of the popular and state representatives. Thus doubly subjected to the principle of equality, by which both these bodies are constituted, it would be doubly inconsistent with our policy, should he imagine himself to be a king.

This idea is in some degree violated, by the practices of district or legislative electors; the latter of which makes state will, and the former, general will, the electors of a president; and it is observed with great accuracy, by that of choosing electors by the people of a state, in the mode of