Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/639

Rh swore to defend liberty, fulfil treaties, and observe charters. Oaths never stop the current of consequences flowing from laws inconsistent with the principles of constitutions. Prospective oaths may possibly be presumptuous and impious, in promising menial stability, when the Deity has not implanted that quality in man. Being taken according to law, and broken according to nature, the reverence which would have sanctified the obligation, had it been limited to past occurrences, is weakened. As a security for the observance of political law, the sovereign power of construction to heal the most tender consciences, renders them quite insignificant. A thousand instances of this species of party medical skill have occurred. "The constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties, shall be the supreme law of the land." Construction can condemn the second member of this sentence into an allegiance to the third, and open the way for a subserviency of the first to the two last. It can substitute for the responsibility of the house of representatives to the people, a submission to the President and Senate. It can require law unsuggested by discretion, and unexamined by the understanding. And it can invest the President and Senate, having the concurrence of the judges, with a power to impose taxes, incur debts, dismember the territory, and legislate almost without limitation. Let us rather then establish principles, than trust to oaths, for the maintenance of our policy.

Patronage must be recorded among the modes of destroying forms of government; or political, by civil law. It can seduce the servants of God to advocate fraud and superstition. It excites talents against truth. It corrupts by hope, by fruition, and by disappointment. It teases and deceives the people by its contentions for office, into a fatal indifference towards the measures of a government. And its poisonous influence reaches electors, as well as representatives, by a thousand imperceptible channels. A balance of good and evil ought to be struck between patronage, exercised by one man or divided among a multitude. In the