Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/596

584 imposed. But political parties have attempted to acquire it in imitation of the English precedents, (which will for ever be admired by men in power) as in the cases of a legal appreciation of paper stock far beyond the price at which it was purchased, of banks, and of the Yazoo report; and if the system of changing the principles of a government by laws is not well understood by the people, they will go on, and at length make sales of national property to stockjobbers, if stockjobbers will sell them support even in the form of a war.

A legislative power of regulating wealth and poverty, is a principle of such irresistible ascendeney, as to bring all political parties to the same standard, and to make it quite indifferent to nations, which shall prevail. It is the solution in which is found the political identity of the whig and tory parties of England, in the exercise of power, during their highest state of aerimony; and in which this acrimony was at length lost.

It is matter of surprise that mankind should owe their greatest calamities to the two most respectable human characters, priests and patriots, from a political gluttony, like that of swallowing too much food, however good. If responsibility to God cannot cure priests of the vices which infect legislative parties of interest, what security lies in a responsibility to man? If the love of souls cannot awaken integrity, laid to sleep by this species of legislative patronage, will it be awakened by a love of wealth and power? But nations have no right to complain, because they corrupt their priests and patriots by temptations, which human nature has never been able to resist. Our policy, rejecting a reliance upon either, because they are men, has endeavoured to exalt political law from a numerical form, into a science; and to substitute permanent principles for fluctuating passions. But if laws can distribute wealth and power, among individuals arranged in combinations to acquire both; and if the fashion should prevail of scanning them by party comments, and not by honest principles; our