Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/95

Rh In short, Mr. Adams's system is bottomed upon a classification of men; our constitutions, upon an application of moral principles to human nature. He arranges men into the one, the few and the many, and bestows on the one and the few, more power than he gives to the many, to counter-balance numerical or physical strength; our constitutions divide power with a view to the responsibility of the agent, and jealous of the danger of accumulating great power in the hands of one or a few, because all history proves that this species of condensation begets tyranny, bestow most power on their most numerous functionary.

Mr. Godwin, in his "Political Justice," v. 2. p. 180, asserts that "scarcely any plausible argument can be adduced in favour of what has been denominated by political writers a division of power." This authoritative decision seems to have been made, without any consideration of the ground upon which a division of power is justified in this essay. Mr. Adams confines a division of power, to a division of orders of men; Mr. Godwin extends it to a division of orders of power, such as legislative, executive and judicative; but this essay, considering a classification of power into orders, as little less erroneoise than a classification of men, extends the idea of its division to the counteraction of monopoly in any form, by a man, an order or a government, in a degree sufficient to excite ambition, avarice or despotism. This idea of a division of power is consonant to the policy of the United States, as is evinced by the responsibility of the executive, the allotments of power to the state and the general governments, and the reservations from the powers of both, retained by the people; and is distinct from the ideas both of Mr. Adams and Mr. Godwin. The latter gentleman's opinions in favour of a division of property, and against a division of power, are inconsistent, if a monopoly of either, will beget a monopoly of both; if wealth attracts power, and power wealth. The same principles dictate a distribution of both; and the same effects flow from an accumulation of either. A law of primogeniture in respect to power, is