Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/550

538 balances, and to be highly adorned with all the comely theories of limited monarchy, invented between the accession of Charles I. and the death of William of Orange; but never actually practised; theories, indebted to the corruption by which they are defeated, for the false evidence of their supposed operation. Like a foreign silk, embroidered with flowers of gold and silver, its splendour on one side conceals the defects of its workmanship; and its insufficiency for use and comfort, as well as its hidden deformities, can only be discovered by adverting to the other. The English writers during the specified period, contain whatever is to be found in the Federalist; but all their theories sunk, as soon as they were promulgated, in a vortex of corruption; and the nation has drawn from them an overwhelming addition to its burdens. What is to keep the same doctrines from the same fate, or shield the United States under their guidance, from the same effects? Our genuine native policy, being woven with strong homespun threads of plain principles, undarned by a fragile foreign glossy manufacture, more likely to ruin than to improve its texture, exposes us to none of those calamities drawn by England from a system, resorted to by the Federalist for the explanation of this policy. By its capacity of operating without the help of bribery and corruption, it discloses its radical difference from a system, so universally allowed to require such assistance, as to have inspired its votaries with a notion, that this bribery and corruption constituted its chief excellence; in truth, there lies no medium between this opinion and a surrender of the system itself. To avoid a dilemma so unpromising, the wide difference between a derivation from fixed moral principles, or from fluctuating mixtures of monarchical, aristocratical and democratical orders or powers, is contended for throughout this essay.

The truths, with which the book we are speaking of abounds, have probably so far covered the errour of deriving the general constitution, from the idea of the old analysis, commingled in imitation of the English system, as to have