Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/641

Rh where discipline is strongest, what will be the success of a free form of government, capable of being sustained only by the convictions of reason, if it is confided to the same species of apathy? Conviction built upon secrecy, is religion built upon mystery. Is religion improved or injured, by being purged of this feculency? Will that which purifies religion, corrupt a government? A system of legislation in favour of parties of exclusive interest, influenced by patronage and shrouded in secrecy, constitutes a body politick of thorough putrefaction in the eyes even of an ordinary republican anatomist. He will easily discern, that though a government founded upon a publick opinion, which opinion was to be founded upon secrecy, might rival the Indian cosmography, it could never know the principles on which it stood.

Governments, like persons or poems, ought to sustain a consistent character. Had Homer made his heroes whine in elegy, or chat in pastoral, he never would have been called the prince of poets. If antiquity had transmitted to us two fabulcus poems; one, of a king, nobility and house of commons, contending for mastery during several centuries; the other, of a nation which had sustained the calamities of a long war to establish a republican government; both concluding in the catastrophe of swallowing up the long adjusting balances, and the late established republicanism, with the greedy throats of paper stock and parties of interest; would they not have been considered as monstrous violations of probability, well depicted in the first five lines of Horace's art of poetry? Still, either monster, like the God Fo, would be celebrated by its priesthood. A knowledge of principles is as indispensable to a nation, to enable it to sustain a free government, as of plants to a horticulturist. It is as absurd to ingraft aristocratical or monarchical buds upon a republican root, as a brier upon an oak. Those who pretend to this art, design gradually to eradicate the oak, and to plant the brier where it stood. By being able to class principles, we shall easily class laws.