Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/543

Rh licks, the virtue of the people, and to monarchies, honour, as necessary principles; are we to believe that tyranny causes the human mind to sparkle with more brilliant honour than freedom; and that freedom teaches the catalogue of humble and meek virtues resulting from oppression, better than tyranny? Or surmounting an authority, overturned by every day's experience, conclude, that bad men may take care of their interest as well as good men, make as good social bargains, and as successfully apply virtuous principles to forms of government.

Mr. Adams's expression is, "that virtue must be the principle of a republican government." Of the government, not of those who live under the government. He means that the government must be constituted upon virtuous or just principles, and not upon fraudulent or unjust. In conformity with this idea, in his dissertation, he calls executive prerogatives badges of slavery;" and yet by his system he considers them as bulwarks to defend the people.

In his dissertation, Mr. Adams utters a penegyrick upon several authors, who had written against the English monarchy. He pronounces with asperity the full competency of those writers to convince any man, that all good government is republican;" and he removes every doubt, as to the sense in which he uses the term, by observing, "that the only good part of the British constitution is republican." And yet a great portion of one volume of Mr. Adams's work, is dedicated to the refutation of Nedham, one of the eulogized authors, in language nearly as rough, as that applied in the dissertation, to those who would not be made republicans by Nedham's arguments. In defence of his dissertation, Mr. Adams relies upon Nedham; in defence of his later system, he endeavours to confute him. In his dissertation, he deduces a form of government from Nedham's position that the people were the best guardians of their own liberties;" in his book, from the position, "that the people are their own worst enemies."