Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/595

Rh a government is arranged, a power of advancing the wealth of one part of the nation, by civil laws, will be used by its successive administrators to obtain a corrupt influence, wholly inconsistent with any good moral principles intervoven in a constitution, and certainly destructive of them. Every party of interest, whether a noble, a religious, or a military order; or created by a corrupting degree of legislative or executive patronage; or by usurping a power of regulating property by means of paper credit, charters or fraudulent wars; is the instrument and ally of the power by which its interest can be fed or starved. It must acquire an influence over legislation, both to do its own work, and the work of the power it serves. It can by law slip under governments a new substratum, without altering a feature of the numerical analysis. And it will be invariably purchased at the publick expense, by the political party in possession of the government, at a rate proportioned to the service it may be able to render.

This game between political and pecuniary parties, is precisely the cause by which free, moderate, and honest forms of government are destroyed; it inflicts heavier taxation, than any other species of misrule; and it cannot be carried on, except by a legislative power to regulate wealth and poverty. In England this power is complete, and has scattered every where parties of interest of all sizes, and individuals, paid for their services directly or indirectly by the political party in power, at the national expense, and ready to serve any political party whatsoever for pay. Hence arise the excessiveness of taxation, the parliamentary corruption, and the frequent wars of that country. None of our constitutions intended to endow legislation with this power of regulating property, thus exercised in England, because its effects there demonstrated, that the moral principles upon which they were built, could not subsist in union with such a power; and that it would have amounted to a provision in them all, for absolving the government from the moral restraints previously