Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/116

110 It has been said that the representative, has the same relations to the minority, as to the majority of his constituents, when elected. In a broader and equally binding sense, he has the same relations to the entire country, as to his own immediate constituents, else would legislation be reduced to a mere contest of local interests, without a regard to justice or to general principles. If this be true, and it must be true, or all the fundamental governing rules of the social compact become of no account, the constituents of a particular representative can have no right even to request, much less to instruct him to support their local interests at the expence of others, and least of all can they have a right to violate the constitution, in order to do so. In this particular, the question has been involved in the same sophisms, and, to a degree, is to be settled by the same principles, as those which appertain to the relations between the accused and his legal counsel. Some latitudinarians in morals have contended that the legal adviser of an accused has a right to do in his defence, whatever the accused himself would do; that he is an attorney, with full powers to execute all that the other's feelings, interests and passions might dictate. This is monstrous and untenable doctrine, being destructive of all moral responsibility, to say nothing of the laws. The counsel, has a right to do no more than his client has a right to do, nor can the constituent, in any case, have a right to instruct his representative to do that which he has no right, in a moral or legal sense, to do himself, even admitting the general doctrine of instruction to be sound.

Although the principle that the representative chosen by a few, becomes the representative of all, is sound as a general principle, it is not an unqualified rule any where, and still less so in the federal