Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/611

Rh virtue, as one, that such acquisitions from social rights shall be suddenly reclaimed, would to the encouragement of vice.

Let us view this subject by the light of moral and republican principles. One branch of a legislature is not invested with a power of making law affirmatively, in a society exercising self government, because it cannot express the common consent, on account of representing only a portion of it. If the reason for prohibiting it from making law by saying yes, is good. how can the same reason allow it to make law by saying no? Shall a law continue? Shall a law be repealed? are the same questions in substance; but English monarely and feudality saw the advantages they would gain over the popular interest by the latter form. It would enable both to retain every encroachment upon popular rights, by the affirmative will of either, under the garb of a negative erroneously supposed to be inefficacious. The pretence, that this negative was necessary in a government of orders, for the preservation of each, is exploded by discovering that such an end would have been much better effected by the principle, that no law should continue without the consent of all. This, in a government composed of three minds or three orders, would have been Aristotle's common consent." And whilst such a principle would have produced the common safety of these distinct political beings, it would have repressed the encroachments of either, by affording a peaceable mode of self security to all, infinitely more effectual for the meditated end, than the civil wars produced by the defectiveness of the remedy resorted to.

Republican and moral principles concur with the language of all our constitutions, in the opinion, that legislatures are divided into several branches, not to enable one only to make law against the will of two others, but to obtain a sounder expression of that common consent, which is the basis of law in a free government. Let us imagine these branches to be three, each consisting of an hundred