Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/613

Rh This invention of the English orders, transplanted by blind imitation into our policy, cannot be favourable to this policy, if it was favourable to those orders. But it may be highly favourable to all the legal aristocracies of interest, which may be created to subsist on the common interest, by impeding the recovery of national rights, conveyed in charters or laws fraught with privileges like those of queen Elizabeth. And if we should even so far violate the principles of our policy, as to reduce the people to the station of a democratick, and to exalt all the charter or privileged men, to that of an aristocratick order, yet self preservation would require a negative in each upon law, as the only security against the disorders, invariably produced in the best constructed species of political balance. It is particularly remarkable therefore, under a system of government, acknowledging the sovereignty of the people, and reprobating privileges and exclusive interests, that laws may be retained against the will of this acknowledged sovereignty, after they have been found to operate to a revolutionary extent, in favour of the reprobated principles. If the form, by which an anomaly so egregious has been ingrafted upon our policy, without the concurrence of the sovereign we acknowledge, was skillfully contrived to yield advantages to the ennobled English orders, its introduction here is no proof of popular acuteness; and if this device is found there to be favourable to the sprouts from the principle of privilege or exclusive interest, in all the modifications produced by modern manners, its partiality to the family of factitious honour, ought not to excuse its partiality to the family of factitious wealth, in the eyes of a sovereign who must supply it.

The numerical analysis is incompetent to the detection of real legislation, by an unconstitutional authority, under a negative ceremony; but the moral will discern with ease, that it is pregnant with effects founded in bad principles, or at least in principles adverse to those of our policy. It invests minorities and parties of interest, with a formidable power of retaining oppressive or fraudulent laws, which the