Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/620

668 success, it has hitherto established a wise numerical form of government, as it supposed, formed a didactick lecture for this government to govern itself by, and thrown away its arms. These are seized by the foe, forged into the shape of civil law, and turned against the late victor; and it soon appears that armed sinners are an overmatch for unarmed saints.—The control of nations over governments, can only consist of political law, enforced by good moral principles. A dread of conventions, enables governments to make political law to control nations. They are compelled to do it, if nations will not, to provide for new circumstances. Thus the design of political law is reversed, and its power for preserving a free government, destroyed.

A nation must keep and use an unlimited power over its government, or a government must acquire such a power over a nation. The question in fact lies between the genuine political law of conventions; and the spurious, made by the frauds of parties of interest, aided by the form of repealing civil laws.

It is an old question. Conventions are discredited for the same reasons, which caused kings, courtiers and publick harpies, to discredit parliaments, whilst they checked fraud and oppression. We have seen in Filmer and other court writers, all the arguments against parliaments, or their frequency, now used against conventions. Parliaments were feared, whilst they nurtured liberty and corrected abuses. Their meetings are no longer deprecated, because this fear is removed by corruption. And an apprehension of conventions in the United States is in like manner a testimonial, both of the eminent virtues they have so often displayed, and of the great abuses which have already eluded their authority.

If our allotment of political law to national conventions, and of civil to governments, so essential for the preservation of liberty, cannot be legitimately defeated by an entire government, the enormity, committed by the creature and dependant of a government, must be flagrant. Judicial