Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/615

Rh instruction, is also used to confer on the representative a power of legislating contrary to the will of his constituents; and yet both the minorities and the representatives acknowledge a moral obligation to be bound by the wills they respectively defeat. Although a nation holding extensive territory, resorts to district election, as the only possible mode of acquiring the benefits of representation, it cannot exercise, it is said, the inherent right of instructing its agents, in the same practicable mode. Had the division of election, heretofore celebrated among the moral beauties of our policy, been rejected, representation must also have been banished from it. Aggregate instruction is as impracticable as aggregate election. But supposing that both or either could have been effected, it was not desirable, if the principle of division is as salutary in restraining the pas sions of the multitude as the powers of a government. And although it is alleged that the risque of re-election is a sufficient substitute for the right of instruction, it is an argument so analogous to the notion of thieves, that the risque of the gallows justifies the theft," as hardly to deserve refutation upon the still stronger ground, that it would deprive nations of self defence whilst their ruin was effecting, upon a speculation quite useless after it is accomplished. A combination among parties of interest, founded upon the negative mode of legislation, thus absolved from the supervision and restraint of instruction, might continue legal tyranny fraudulently or accidentally introduced, against the will of a nation and of the majority of its representatives, if it possesses no practicable mode of instruction; and its own money would at the same time pay the cost of treas and be used in corrupting election itself.

Liberty, like religion, is lost by planting it in dogma. Roman Catholick christianity was corrupted by heathen ceremonies. The United States have burst through the political superstitions of church and state, and protection and allegiance, into the principle of national right to make and alter national laws; and boast of consitutions culture-