Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/626

614 and strength enables individuals to maintain their rights, why may not social rights be maintained by the same agents? Is it virtue which enables one nation to conquer another, or a treacherous faction to enslave their own country? Virtue could not protect the Roman Senators against the swords of the Gauls, and vice can see that eleven men can control the tyranny of one. If minorities often make themselves tyrants by wisdom, why may not nations preserve their liberty by it? Why do all minor societies find wisdom and republican principles, the best securities against their own vices, if they are no check upon national vices? Why are conventions useful to them, and pernicious to nations? And why are additional conventional laws necessary for the safety of sub-societies, but not for national safety? The solution of these inconsistencies is short and plain. Conventions, wisdom, and republican principles, are the best controllers of vice hitherto discovered. All sub-societies, therefore, use them to restrain the vices of their own members. But they are not willing that nations should use them, for the same reason by which they are induced to do it. Being themselves the least virtuous members of every nation, they are unwilling to suffer the control they carefully inflict. To this cunning and self interest mankind are indebted for the doctrine, "that they cannot be free unless they are virtuous." Whereas the fact is, that virtue may be more safely dispensed with in a national convention, than in an inferior association, or in an individual; because wisdom in the first case is exposed to no temptation to vice, as it can discern no object to defraud or oppress; whereas such objects, in abundance, assault the wisdom of exclusive interests. Wisdom is of no use without will, and national will with us can only be expressed by conventions, or additional political Jaw. By withholding from a nation the use both of its wisdom and will, it must become a statue, and some aristocracy of interest, a Prometheus, who will animate it with such civil law as he pleases, but never inspire it with celestial fire.