Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/665

Rh good moral principles, we should instantly discern that the same tribunal would detect the vices of the government we have selected; and that an analysis, similar to that formed in our own minds to try supposed culprits, might be perfected into a complete capacity for rooting up as they are planted, those legal scions, which otherwise never fail to grow, until they draw to themselves all the nourishment of a free government.

It is necessary to illustrate these observations by the aid of a familiar fact. The two parties, called republican and federal, have hitherto undergone but one revolution. Yet each when in power, preached Filmer's old doctrine of passive obedience in a new form, with considerable success; and each out of power strenuously controverted it. The party in power asserted, that however absurd or slavish this doctrine was under other forms of the numerical analysis, the people under ours were identified (the new term to cog this old doctrine upon the United States) with the government; and that therefore an opposition to the government, was an opposition to the nation itself. The extraction of passive obedience, of all political principles the most slavish, out of the best member of the numerical analysis, as the extractors themselves confess, furnishes a conclusive proof of its insufficiency for teaching us how to preserve a free form of government. This identifying doctrine is exactly analogous to Agrippa's fraudulent apologue, for constituting a government the intellectual dictating head of the whole body politick, and subjecting the members to a passive obedience. It puts an end to the idea of a responsibility of the government to the nation; sameness cannot be responsible to sameness. It renders useless or impracticable the freedom of speech and of the press. It converts the representative into the principal. It destroys the division of power between the people and the government, as being themselves indivisible. And in short it is inconsistent with every principle by which politicians and philosophers have hitherto defined a free government. This ingenious doctrine of