Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/660

648 A free goyernment, like the trinity, consists of integral qualities. General legislation or legal impartiality is one. I^gal dispensations of wealth, being a contrary quality, cannot he also a qtiality of a free government. On the contrary they enable governours to create factions, feed avarice, and usurp arbitrary power. Perhaps the final success of the revolutianary war, was produced by the depreciation of the paper money, and the other causes, by which government was prevented from creating parties of interest by pecuniary laws; an impotence which guaranteed the pritriotism even of both ins and outs. Election, though another integer of a free government, is so far from being a compensation for the errour of distributing property by Tan, that it is itself coi*ruptcd by it. In England it is made the instrument of the will, the advocate of the follies, and tise shelter for the crimes of an officer, who is thus constituted a despot, capable only of being displaced by another (k^spot. An alliance between election and a legislative power to divide property, constitutes the elysium of statesmen and the purgatory of labour and industry. There is no other mode by which one party can be induced to pay, and the other can acquire as much money. Hence statesmen will for ever admire and recommend the English form of government. But what answer could they give to the fol- lowing simple address: « You tell us that we shall be wonderfully benefitted by legal transfers of our income to the creatures of law, in a multitude of modes. As your arguments perplex us, be pleased for one year to transfer the income of these creatures ef law to the children of industry, that we may feel the truth."

The question, "whether a legal power can be constitutionally used to impair or destroy the principles of cur policy," has been already brought before the publick, in the efforts of the general government to distribute gain or loss between the states by protecting duties, banking charters, making canals and roads, and other legal benefactions. The children of a father who lives for ever, but annually