Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/601

Rh nation to free the party in power from responsibility; a national debt to chain the wealthy to the combination by the same strong ligament which binds them in France to Bonaparte; a direction of the publick admiration to military men; to reduce those most likely to oppose arbitrary laws, to a state of inferiority; a neglect of the militia, under the doctrine that it is unfit to resist foreign armies, so as to make it unable to resist domestick; a gradual reduction of the state governments to insignificance; and a perpetual increase of the energy of government, under the pretext of extensive territory; being all within the scope of the powers of the general government, will all be summoned to the aid of any combination between political departments; and a power of regulating property by law would dig the fosse of corruption, and render the circumvallation for its defence, impregnable to its slaves. Against this host of dangers, no security occurs to me, except a strict scrutiny into laws and all the measures of government, by the light of good moral principles.

Our policy has attempted to wrest war from the hands of executive power, lest it should be used as a means of making legislative an instrument for advancing its projects, and representation a mask to conceal them. War is the keenest carving knife for cutting up nations into delicious morsels for parties and their leaders. It swells a few people to a monstrous moral size, and shrivels a multitude to an equally unnatural diminituveness. It puts arms into the hands of ambition, avarice, pride, and self love, and aggravates these passions by erecting the holders into a separate interest, which without arms has in no shape been made just or honest by the restraints of moral principles or didactick prohibitions. It breeds a race of men, nominally heroes, mistaken for patriots, and really tyrants. It enable knaves and traitors to delude the multitude into a belief that real patriots are knaves and traitors, and thus to force good men to become the instruments of bad, to avoid the persecutions of this delusion. And without a sound militia, it is