Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/528

516 nation to the constant spoliation of a successive authority, more aggravating to vicious passions, because more unsettled than monarchy itself.

Far from correcting the abuses with which they charge each other, their leaders, trusting to the pernicious doctrine of confidence and authority, will convert their mutual abuses into mutual precedents. Neither parties nor individuals will voluntarily diminish power in their own hands, however pernicious they have declared it to be in the hands of others, because if they are vicious, they are willing to abuse it, if virtuous, they presumptuously confide in their own moderation; therefore abuses can never be corrected, where confidence and authority have subverted national principles.

As authority generates the same effects upon all men, the men are not blameable, because it is obvious from the constancy of the effects, that the force of authority is irresistible by human nature. If a physician mingles poison with wholesome food, not he who is poisoned, but the physician who poisons him, deserves punishment. If a nation poisons parties or individuals, or its own government, with confidence and authority, the nation which applies the poison, and not those who cannot avoid its effects, is blameable; and therefore the moral law is strictly just, which recompenses with arbitrary sway, those poisoned by confidence, and punishes the poisoners themselves with slavery. The same inexorable moral law brings similar private guilt or folly to due expiation. Individuals, like nations, who substitute in the management of their servants, confidence and authority for an inquisitive scrutiny and a strict responsibility, are exposed to pillages, which justly transfer their estates to those whom they have thus corrupted.

As the guilt of nations in betraying posterity to oppression by yielding to authority, is inevitably punished by their own subjugation, the severity of this punishment constitutes a proof of the badness of the principle, satisfactory to all who believe in a superintending providence. Parties who