Page:John Adams - A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America Vol. I. (1787).djvu/145

Rh the powers within them are not ufficiently balanced. He might have recollected, that a pointed rod, a machine as imple as a waggoner, or a monarch, or a governor, would be ufficient at any time, ilently and innocently, to diarm thoe aemblies of all their terrors, by retoring between them the balance of the powerful fluid, and thus prevent the danger and detruction to the properties and lives of men, which often happen for the want of it.

However, alluions and illutrations drawn from patural and rural life are never diagreeable, and in this cae might be as appoite as if they had been taken from the ciences and the kies.—Harrington, if he had been preent in convention, would have exclaimed, as he did when he mentioned his two girls dividing and chooing a cake, "Oh! the depth of the widom of God, which in the imple invention of a carter, has revealed to mankind the whole mytery of a commonwealth; which conits as much in dividing and equalizing; forces; in controuling the weight of the load and the activity of one part, by the trength of another, as it does in dividing and chooing." Harrington too, intead of his children dividing and chooing their cake, might have alluded to thoe attractions and repulions, by which the balance of nature is preerved: or to thoe centripetal and centrifugal forces, by which the heavenly bodies are continued in their orbits, intead of ruhing to the un, or flying off in tangents among comets and fixed tars: impelled, or drawn by different forces in different directions, they are bleings to their own inhabitants and the neighbouring ytems; but if they were drawn only by one, they would introduce anarchy wherever they hould go. There is no objection to uch ions,