Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/534

522 "These elections may be septennial or triennial, but for my own part I think they ought to be annual, for there is not in all science a maxim more infallible than this, where annual elections end, there slavery begins."

"But all necessary regulations for the method of constituting this assembly, may be better made in times of more quiet than the present, and they will suggest themselves naturally, when the powers of government shall be in the hands of the people's friends. For the present it will be safest to go on in the usual way."

"But we have as yet advanced only one step in the formation of a government. Having obtained a representative assembly, what is to be done next? Shall we leave all the powers of government to this assembly? Shall they make and execute, and interpret laws too? I answer no; a people cannot be long free, and never can be happy whose laws are made, executed and interpreted by one assembly. My reasons for this opinion are these."

"A single assembly is liable to all the rices, follies and frailties of an individual. Subject to fits of humour, transports of passion, partialities of prejudice; and from these and other causes, apt to make hasty results and absurd judgements: all which errours ought to be corrected, and inconveniencies guarded against by some controlling power."

"A single assembly is apt to grow avaricious, and in time would not scruple to exempt itself from burdens which it would lay upon its constituents, without sympathy."

"A single assembly will become ambitious, and after some time will vote itself perpetual. This was found in the case of the long parliament: but more remarkably in the case of Holland, whose assembly first voted that they should hold their seats for seven years, then for life, and after some time, that they would fill up vacancies as they should happen, without applying to their constituents at all."