Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/597

Rh beautiful experiment of confiding for a free government in good moral principles rather than in priests or patriots, will be exchanged for a confidence in stockjobbers and various other parties of interest.

These parties plead patriotism to ignorance and credulity, and offer wealth and power to avarice and ambition. The most fraudulent is loudest in professions of zeal for the publick good, and like the Mississippi and South Sea projects, is often the most successful; because the vicious principle of creating wealth by law, having debauched the minds of the audience, no dishonesty appears to be attached to any excesses of legislative robbery. Audacity or delusion at length inculcates an opinion, that he who refuses to surrender his conscience and his understanding to some party, is a knave or a fool; a knave, in pretending to honesty under a legislative distribution of wealth; and a fool, for preferring hopeless efforts to serve the publick, to his own aggrandizement at the publick expense. Thus the maxims taught by the legal intercourse between political and pecuniary parties reverse the dictates of common sense and common honesty. Knaves or fools only, surrender their duties and rights to party despotism. Knaves, to get a share in its acquisitions ; fools, because they are deceived. Can an honest man of sound understanding think himself bound by wisdom or duty, to give or sell himself to one of two parties, prompted by interest and ambition to impair the publick good? Are men bound by wisdom or honour to take side with one of two competitors, if both are robbers or usurpers? On the contrary, as neither could succeed except by dividing the national force between them, a nation of fools only could be drawn into a division, in which the success of either party, is a calamity to a majority of both. And as civil government affords wealth and power to a very small proportion of a nation, if those who reap neither from it, are seduced into an opinion that they ought to enlist under one of two small parties contending for both, they are only entitled to the same character, as being the instruments of