Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/606

594 exhibited so dazzling a degree of success in the legislative mode of becoming rich, that all the objections against thorn as a mode of poisoning our policy, disappeared; and our legislatures suddenly became staples for manufacturing anew the political wares broken to pieces by the revolution. If the English nation, at the accession of William of Orange, had restored to the crown the fraudulent prerogatives, for exercising which Charles bled and James was expelled, our legislatures would have had a precedent for reviving the monarchical policy of welding aristocracies of interest to our new government in a thousand forms, by legal distributions of wealth at the publick expense. Privileges and monopolies, flowing from law, are of the same nature as if they came from prerogative, like the same poison poured from different phials. The English declaration of rights at the revolution, does not more explicitly condemn the oppressions it corrects, than our state constitutions condemn the principle of creating aristocracies by legal privileges. This declaration is the most explicit acquisition obtained by that nation at the expense of much civil war, in favour of civil liberty, but its benefits have been defeated by making the statute book a receptacle for the same frauds which were formerly recorded in the archives of prerogative. An hundred laws to create an hundred aristocracies of interest, if they collect as much money, are the same to a nation, as an hundred of queen Elizabeth's monopoly grants. These laws require armies and penalties to defend them, live in the United States upon agriculture, and fear a militia. No government ever commenced its operations with so pliable a people, as that of the United States. Among their most firmly rooted principles, were an aversion for legal privileges, aristocracies of interest and standing armies; and an affection for agriculture, commerce and the militia. By considering the effects of legal patronage upon the first triumvirate, and the effects of withholding it from the second, its force upon national policy, and its capacity to produce one evil as a cause for another, will be seen. A mili-