Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/525

Rh is an advertisement that it is already a knave, or will finally become a tyrant.

If authority should miraculously possess integrity, it is more liable to capricious errours and absurd prejudices, than national judgement. The wisest man is never free from these humiliations of human vanity, but he can never convince the majority of a nation, that his humours are wise. National opinion shields mankind against the afflictions arising from individual caprice and prejudice, to which authority exposes them; and therefore it is a wiser, besides being an honester standard of truth.

We may without much difficulty discover our own opinion, but not one in a thousand can possibly know the opinion of the authority in which he confides. Like a river, it commences in a diminutive rill, which is swelled in its course by innumerable turbid and nauseous additions, until not a drop of the original fountain, can be obtained; whilst confidence must still swallow the contaminating compound, and allow its impurities to be transubstantiated into holy water. The supposed fountain is even often quite dry; and a river wholly deceptious is formed, without containing a single drop from the source it claims, to raise an artificial current, for conveying, not the nation, but demagogues or knaves, into a good harbour. It is not therefore matter of any astonishment, that most publick measures derived from authority, end in repentance.

Wherever authority guides a nation or a political party, there cannot be a national or party principle, opinion or measure. It converts nations into the engines of an aspiring individual or a faction, for enslaving themselves; and parties into beasts, to be ridden by a few artful men into office. To this surrender of national and party principles and opinions to authority, is to be superadded, the stupidity of corrupting the object of confidence itself, by assuring it of indiscriminate support. Propelled by this preposterous admonition towards its natural bent, authority very soon abolishes the distinction between principles, par-