Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/589

Rh proclaiming a tendency, which instantly alarms despotism; and it brings back the government to its principle by suppressing the inimical tendency. Free government has only to be equally vigilant against these inimical tendencies, to live longer than despotism; for as party interest is unnatural to one in a state of purity, so is it to the other.

Instances without number might be adduced, to shew, that separate interest is a thermometer accurately disclosing the progress of a revolution, both in property and principles; and that the latter are modelled by fraudulent dispositions of the first. In England, though titles remain, patrician and plebeian parties have yielded to a party or aristocracy of interest. Whigs and tories are melted into one mass, by the same crucible. This crucible is made of paper stock and patronage. The property it invades, plunders, and distributes, has begotten new parties, and abolished old principles. In the United States, no parties of importance have ever appeared, except such as arose from paper stock and patronage; and by this transfer of property, old principles, as in England, will unquestionably be altered or destroyed.

If the term "patronage" was limited to wages for publick service, legislative, executive or judicial, yet should those wages be made so high as to produce detriment to the publick, the surplus beyond the sum required by publick good is fraudulently transferred by law. In computing them. every consideration in relation to the receiver of the wages. ought to be excluded, because they are bestowed to benefit. not him, but the nation. Even legislative wages, capable of protracting sessions for the sake of transferring a greater mass of property, from the payer to the receiver, or of exciting election frauds may form a secret and mischievous party of interest, under its own patronagé.

The argument, by which plentiful wages are defended, is, the tendency of low to expel merit and talents from legislatures, and to throw government into the hands of a wealthy order. This argument can only be of force in