Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/618

606 prolifick being? It leaves every thing behind which does not move with it, except mere matter, and hence laws thus forsaken are called "a dead letter." When the mind, upon which a constitution was calculated to operate, is gone, though it may exist embalmed in the statute hook like magna charta, it exists in the repose and nullity of a mummy. If a moiety of national moral character is changed, then an unchanged constitution would be half dead, and the remainder would be in the state of a living twin, united to a dead one. A constitution cannot be kept alive, or efficient, except by connecting it with a living national character; this is not to be done in any other mode, than that of extending its remedies to new inventions and living abuses, before they gain strength to defy reformation. A neglect of this precaution by political, and a constant use of it, by civil law, is the cause of the difference between the danger of altering, these two kinds of law. Attempts to reform abuses of long standing, generally terminate like those of the emperor Pertinax or of the French jacobins. When civil war is the reformer, it is apt to forget its business, and to create more cause for reformation than it removes. When the funding invention, which has nearly destroyed the political weight of the English nobility, and wholly overwhelmed that of the landed interest, or interest of industry, was in its infancy, this species of revolution, not provided against by magna charta (considering that instrument in the light of a constitution) might have been arrested by an addition to the political code; but now the English nation is forced to live under the oppressions of this modern invention, only to aggravate the evils to be suffered at its death.

The idea "that it is wrong to correct wrong," is illustrated by the errours it engrafted on Christianity in the church of Rome, and the injury that church thereby sustained. If revelation can be corrupted and its end defeated by civil laws, how can a constitution, contrived by human wisdom, be sale against the ambition and avarice of parties and individuals? It is better illustrated by the usual