Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/546

534 period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to have lived." Had they risen from their graves at that time, they would have joined their labours to his, in drawing government from this new source; at least it was this unprecedented event which caused Mr. Adams to think, that the sages of antiquity would, if they could, have lived altogether in the United States, at the era of the revolution.

But if they could now rise from their graves, how sorely would they feel the mortification of finding, that Mr. Adams himself had given up national opinion as a source of government; and had gone back in search of political improvement to forms, with which it had as little to do, as with climate?

The discovery, that the moral effects of accident, fraud and force, were better than the moral effects of man's free intellectual powers, would either have exceedingly humiliated these sages, or they would have denied the fact, and have placed before the United States a picture of all the governments, not the result of free intellect, to compare with the only government which is so.

Orders would be the most prominent feature in the whole of these arbitrary or accidental governments; and no instance would appear of their having ever been created by free national intellect. Mankind have been scourged for ages by these self created beings; the United States have preferred free will and intellect to this scourge; and the question is, whether they will revolt from their own understandings, for the sake of having as little choice in their government as in their climate.

If the circle of ages has exhibited all polished nations, except one, without choice as to their forms of government; and if most, or all of these disinherited nations, contained noble or separate orders; can time make stronger the evidence, to prove, that these orders were in reality the usurpers of the birthright belonging to nations, and that the solitary nation, so fortunate as to preserve it, owes its prosperity to their absence?