Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/645

Rh of parties of interest, which are not necessary evils, when it is so difficult to manage one? Their unrestrained vices replenish governours with the bad qualities designed to be effaced by political law; and the loyalty of folly to party names, occasionally releases a government from the wholesome restraints of political law and good moral principles, so as to place arbitrary power within the reach of the human deities of the day.

Let us draw a short comparison between the true legal policy of the United States, according to their constitutions. and that of England. The first is guildless of making legal virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, wealth and poverty; of preventing industry from counteracting pernicious extremes; and of rooting out social order by levelling, or social liberty, by monopolizing laws, to exhilirate [sic] transiently mad zealots, or to enrich permanently knavish parties of interest. The disposition of wealth to individuals and parties of interest, is the essential employment of the English legal policy. In such a legal policy is lodged the kernel of every civilized tyranny, however the shells may be diversified. If a nation is wise enough to chace this single political demon out of its statute book, it can hardly lose its liberty; if it is so weak, as to surrender that book to the fiend, it cannot keep it. By leaving property to be divided by industry, the avarice of the majority is engaged on the side of a free government; by legal divisions of it, the avarice of a minority is bribed to destroy one. Nature, cries one philosopher, produces equality; it produces aristocracy or the well born, says another; our policy draws on itself the hatred of both, by refusing to both, laws for effecting that which they assert is produced by nature; the English obtains the admiration of one, for effecting by law, that which is said to have been effected by nature.

Laws to make men rich, are like those to make them wise. Both cause innumerable evils to mankind. The wise men made by nature, are eternally overturning those made by law; and industry, like wisdom, being unequally