Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/558

546 souls, all bad, as being inspired with jealousy and hatred against each other. If one good and one bad souli make a being, requiring all the varieties of legal and political responsibility, what is to be expected of a being compounded of three bad souls, without any responsibility? Or how can the favourers of the system of balances justly ridicule Godwin. on account of his project for casting out man's bad soul by reason, when they propose to neutralise or destroy the good one by hereditary power and jealous orders?

Mr. Adams. in availing himself of the authority of Aristotle, as being "full of the balances," furnishes us with another illustration of the subject we are discussing.

That ancient philosopher assigned the legislative power to the people at large; the executive, to the magistrates; and the judicative, to the tribunals of justice. These magistrates and judges were to be appointed by the people. This species of mixt government, he supposes to be adapted for one city; and he adds, that the government of an agricultural people, ought on the other hand to be popular.

The inconclusiveness of these ideas is obvious. They propose that magistrates should be magistrates; and judges, judges. They suppose a more popular government, than one wherein the whole prople legislate and appoint all publick officers; and they are destitute of any artificial arrangement of power, either by balancing co-ordinate bodies of men, subjecting all publiek officers to national control and sovereignty, or dividing it into manageable sections.

The idea of a political trinity, coequal, could never have entered into the head of Aristotle, because his magistrates, being elective, were not co-eternal with the people; and ei ng [sic] artificial, the architect might demolish as well as build. He would as soon have imagined, when a statuary had finished three statues, that these statues naturally swallowed up the statuary, as when a nation had created