Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/648

636 is equally just. As nature compelled man to acquire in order to exist, his acquisitions from his own labour are his property, according to the law of his maker; since man must have existed before society. Man's unequal moral and physical powers and wants, further disclose nature's enmity to the equality of his acquisitions. And the pleasures and pains annexed to industry and idleness, strongly prove that they are bestowed by nature, as just rewards or punishments for a virtue or a vice. But both the levellers and monopolists are for destroying nature's or the creator's law, built upon these physical and moral grounds; the first faction, because property is thereby made too unequal, the second, because the same law distributes it too equally; and though inveterate enemies, they agree that this divine errour should be corrected by human laws; only that each contends for an opposite excess, and brands the extremity of its adversary with all the epithets used to define tyranny. But either would be a legal metempsychosis of our policy. The levellers, indeed, by attempting that which is unattainable, betray the principle of leaving property to be divided by industry, and destroy the interest by which they are directed. If the accumulators succeed, the two most remark- able revolutions recorded in history, will terminate at the points they started from; the equality of France, in a despotick hereditary dynasty; and the republicanism of the United States, in the English aristocracy, compounded of a variety of parties of interest.

This species of confederation, so different from that by which these states are united, has invented a species of law neither constitutional nor legislative; and sought for a new term to gain for it an independency of the nation, who can alter the one species of law; and of legislatures, which can annul the other. Law-charter claims an inviolability beyond all civil and political laws whatsoever. The origin and use of instruments assuming the privilege of violating whatever principles they please, without being subject to any, is worthy of some attention.