Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/617

Rh ambition will never require them? If a party should persuade a nation to make no more laws against fraud, would it not be considered as a band of thieves? The illustration of the opinion that it is dangerous to devise new remedies against avarice and ambition," by the idea of prohibiting amendments or additions to civil law, is too feeble. Individuals would retain the right and the power of self defence, against injuries from individuals, for which the civil code provided no remedy; but all aristocracies of interest, or combinations of avarice and ambition, work their ends with civil law, against which a nation has no remedy, if amend- ments or additions to political law should fall into disuse. Wherever the idea of political law exists, frequent charges will be laid before the people against those in power, for violating it; and as these charges will seldom want some foundation, they will sometimes cause the nation to transfer the reins of government to the accusers; but they seldom or never produce any effectual new political law, because the accusers, by acquiring power, are converted into an aristocracy of interest; at least to the extent of the universal desire to hold good offices; and instantly become more inclined to extend this power by the help of the precedents of their predecessors, than to contract it, by declaring these precedents to be unconstitutional or fraudulent.

The policy of the United States is attached to the idea of a government contrived for dispensing benefits equally, (the case of payment for publick services excepted) and adverse to all partial dispensations. In an extensive country, conventions (as we understand the term) are the only guardians of this policy, and civil law is every where the chief or only instrument by which it is destroyed. A rejection of its creator and guardian, and a confidence in its destroyer, would be a revival of the policy by which mankind are universally enslaved.

Legal preseience must for ever remain imperfect, because the evolutions of the human mind can never be limited. How can unchangeable constitutions manage this