Page:John Adams - A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America Vol. I. (1787).djvu/155

Rh added, it never fails to be the detruction of the commonwealth. What hall be done to guard againt it? Shall they be all maacred? This experiment has been more than once attempted, and once at leat tried. Guy Faux attempted it in England; and a king of Denmark, aided by a popular party, effected it once in Sweden; but it anwered no good end. The moment they were dead, another aritocracy intantly aroe, with equal art and influence, with les delicacy and dicretion, if not principle, and behaved more intolerably than the former. The country, for centuries, never recovered from the ruinous conequences of a deed o horrible, that one would think it only to be met with in the hitory of the kingdom of darknes.

There is but one expedient yet dicovered, to avail the ociety of all the benefits from this body of men, which they are capable of affording, and at the fame time to prevent them from undermining or invading the public liberty; and that is, to throw them all, or at leat the mot remarkable of them, into one aembly together, in the legilature; to keep all the executive power entirely out of their hands as a body; to erect a firt magitrate over them, inveted with the whole executive authority; to make them dependent on that executive magitrate for all public executive employments; to give that firt magitrate a negative on the legilature, by which he may defend both himelf and the people from all their enterprizes in the legilature; and to erect on the other ide of them an impregnable barrier againt them, in a houe of commons, fairly, fully, and adequately repreenting the people, who hall have the power both of negativing all their attempts at encroachments in the legilature, and of withholding both from them and the crown all plies,