Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/608

596 would sell much better. And after refusing to be defrauded of the crown lands by the term "prerogative," in an age more enlightened she has been deluded by the terms "charter and national credit," into sales of her liberty and property, under the usual pretexts of statesmen, but really to enrich parties of interest, to sustain ministries, and to feed vices tenfold in number, and similar in depravity, to those which caused the alienations of crown lands.

The practice of legislation, in imitation of queen Elizabeth, of selling charters of privilege, will suggest some remedy against reviving an old evil in this new node; and though the same applause awaits the repeal of law charters, which has been paid by all historians to her repeal of privilege charters, (because the receivers or purebasers of national rights, if they are exeuseable for the attempt to acquire, can never be admitted to have effected the acquisition,) yet her precedent will rob it of the honour of first breaking down the barriers of private avarice, to come at the publick interest.

"Common consent," Aristotle's definition of law, is only correct in reference to societies actually exercising the right of self government. Force and fraud are in fact more frequently sources of law, than consent. Of this, the argument, that a law should remain against common consent, because it had been enacted by it, is an eminent instance. Does it require a politician as crafty as the English judge who invented the mode of docking entails of land, to teach us how to dock entails of the errours, vices, follies and misfortunes of the dead upon the living? Our common consent is expressed representatively, in a mode of feudal origin, by which dead, often legislates against the will of living con- sent. If the representative mind consists of three portions, one third can legislate against the will of two thirds; if of two, one moiety legislates against the will of the other. Custom of feudal contrivance, hasted us not only into the practice of sustaining law against the consent of two thirds, or a moiety of the legislating mind, but even in the case