Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/637

Rh without mutiny. A theory of what might have been achie- ved by a great regular army, is arrayed against a mass of actual services rendered by the militia. But it ought never to be forgotten, that the maladies which swept away the first small army, would have reached a great one; that the inability to arm, clothe, feed and physick it, would not have been removed by its increase; that the small army hardly suffered those unavoidable privations, which a large one would have redressed in its own way; and that this experiment of a militia, was made by a government without resources, without military knowledge, unestablished, and divided into thirteen independent sections.

No department of the legislative policy of the states, separately or united, seems to me to be more defective, than the management of the militia; which, like a government, is capable of being corrupted or destroyed by bad principles. The militia of Virginia, for instance, is commanded by officers holding commissions by a more independent tenure than the judges; namely, during good behaviour, of which they are themselves to decide; and these officers are almost entirely promoted by rank. Responsibility is lost or enfeebled. Successional power, as poisonous to our policy as hereditary, supersedes the qualities fit for office; and patrician no- tions are infused into those who ought to be the vindicators of equal rights. If civil offices were made successional, if they were held for life, and if the incumbents were only responsible to their own corps, it would beget a political exhibition resembling a militia, moulded by the same principles.

The commendations bestowed by foreigners upon our form of government, are suggested by an inspection of our political laws, and the principles they inculcate upon civil legislation. It is probable that a discouragement and neglect of agriculture and the militia, was never suggested by this inspection to the most capricious imagination; and yet it is equally probable, that our legislatures have devoted a thousand fold more time to the single subject of banking, than to both. The maxim, "that natious cannot be free