Page:John Adams - A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America Vol. I. (1787).djvu/52

14 —Here again are remarkable limitations: he mut be a foreigner, and he is for three years. This is to give ome degree of tability to the judicial power, and to make it a real and powerful check both to the executive and legilative.

We are not indeed told whether the council of forty are elected annually or for life. Mr. Addion may, from his well-known character, be uppoed to have been more attentive to the grand and beautiful monuments of ancient arts of every kind which urrounded him in Italy, than to this rough hillock, although the form of government might have excited his curioity, and the implicity of manners his eteem; he has accordingly given a very imperfect ketch of its contitution and hitory. Yet enough appears to hew incontetibly, that St. Marino is by no means a perfect democracy. It is a mixture of monarchy, aritocracy, and democracy, as really as Sparta or Rome were, and as the Maachuetts, New-York, and Maryland now are, in which the powers of the governor, enate, and aembly, are more exactly acertained and nicely balanced, but they are not more ditinct than thoe of the capitaneos, council of forty, and the arengo are in St. Marino.

Should it be argued, that a government like this, where the overeignty reides in the whole body of the people, is a democracy, it may be anwered, that the right of overeignty in all nations is unalienable and indiviible, and does and can reide no where ele; but not to recur to a principle o general, the exercie, as well as right of overeignty, in Rome, reided in the people, but the government was not a democracy. In America, the right of overeignty reides indiputably in the body of the people, and they have the whole