Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/656

644 to be circulated by a few men. If merit could arrange its own claims to office, with a degree of justice infinitely exceeding the power of one man, that imperfect mode of appointment would never have been admitted. Industry, talents and labour can arrange their rights to property, with infinitely more justice, than any species of legislative distribution can effect. Election infuses into the legislature a quantity of publick spirit, beyond what it infuses into a president, of numerical proportion; but this spirit commensurate to our territory, is itself altered and narrowed by replacing it with the avarice and ambition of individuals, infused by a power of distributing wealth by law. By superadding this power to the injurious influence of executive patronage, self interest is awakened as far as it can be awakened by any political means, and totally expels from legislatures the publick spirit infused by election, because representatives able to distribute wealth, never forget themselves. Oligarchy and aristocracy are the natural fruits of this legislative patronage, far richer than the president's, and corrupting whole corporations and all legislative personages. And if our policy meditated an elective aristocracy still less than an elective monarchy, any mode of introducing one, must be a usurpation. As money and power accumulate together, laws for introducing one will produce both.

In empowering governments to control the passions which stimulate individuals to injure each other, nations have unwarily by unnecessary powers, stimulated governours to become themselves the wrong doers. The whole preference of the policy of the United States, consists in an avoidance of this errour; by adopting the errour, this preference will be lost; the old system of distributing property by law, is exactly that unnecessary power, by which most or all the governments tried by men, have been stimulated to oppress the people, upon the merit of preventing the people from oppressing each other. Hence has arisen the difficulty of deciding between republican and monarchical forms of government. When both exercise the tyrannical