Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/658

646 There is no difficulty in deciding upon the proper objects of this expulsion. The polarity of the moral is as distinct as that of the material world. A politician as certainly knows the point of the moral compass to which the system of distributing wealth by law, inclines, as the mariner, whether his needle points toward the north or the south. The polarity of the re-eligibility of the president has been seen in the re-eligibility of consuls Augustus and Bonaparte; and that of individual patronage and legal parties of interest, is before our eyes in the present state of Europe. The extent and situation of the territory of the United States, enable them to resist this system more successfully than any other nation. Extent keeps at a distance from the bulk of the nation the calamities of war, and enables it to reflect. Cut up into sections, not a single individual might escape them. Small nations are continually exposed to the artifice of legal wars, from the facilities for them furnished by impinging territories; and are debarred from the use of reason to detect the fraud, by the universality of the distraction they produce. But a nation possessed of extensive territory. happily removed from real causes of collision with other nations, like the United States, is peculiarly favoured by providence for the detection of this artifice (so generally practised by ins and outs, and other parties of interest) both as the pretext for it must be shallower, and the national capacity for its detection by reflection and reason, greater. The pledge for a free government arising from the extent and situation of our territory is so transcendant, that the enemies of a republican form of government craftily inculcate an opinion, that this form is not adapted for an extensive territory; for the purpose of producing territorial divisions to discredit republican systems, by the calamities to which impinging states are exposed from the artifices of parties of interest; or with a design of transferring to their rival, monarchy, the advantage of extensive territory, so important that it is at least doubtful whether a greater portion of human happiness would not result from