There is one topic upon which I hope I shall be excused in going a
little beyond my design. The factions, now so busy amongst us, in order
to divest men of all love for their country, and to remove from their
minds all duty with regard to the state, endeavour to propagate an
opinion, that the PEOPLE, in forming their commonwealth, have by no
means parted with their power over it. This is an impregnable citadel,
to which these gentlemen retreat whenever they are pushed by the battery
of laws and usages, and positive conventions. Indeed, it is such and of
so great force, that all they have done, in defending their outworks, is
so much time and labour thrown away. Discuss any of their schemes--their
answer is--It is the act of the PEOPLE, and that is sufficient. Are we
to deny to a MAJORITY of the people the right of altering even the
whole frame of their society, if such should be their pleasure? They may
change it, say they, from a monarchy to a republic to-day, and to-morrow
back again from a republic to a monarchy, and so backward and forward
as often as they like. They are masters of the commonwealth; because in
substance they are themselves the commonwealth. The French revolution,
say they, was the act of the majority of the people; and if the majority
of any other people, the people of England for instance, wish to make
the same change, they have the same right. Just the same, undoubtedly.
That is, none at all. Neither the few nor the many have a right to
act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust,
engagement, or obligation. The constitution of a country being once
settled upon some compact, tacit or expressed, there is no power
existing of force to alter it, without the breach of the covenant, or
the consent of all the parties. Such is the nature of a contract.
And the votes of a majority of the people, whatever their infamous
flatterers may teach in order to corrupt their minds, cannot alter the
moral any more than they can alter the physical essence of things. The
people are not to be taught to think lightly of their engagements to
their governors; else they teach governors to think lightly of their
engagements towards them. In that kind of game in the end the people are
sure to be losers. To flatter them into a contempt of faith, truth,
and justice, is to ruin them; for in these virtues consist their whole
safety. To flatter any man, or any part of mankind, in any description,
by asserting, that in engagements he or they are free whilst any other
human creature is bound, is ultimately to vest the rule of morality
in the pleasure of those who ought to be rigidly submitted to it; to
subject the sovereign reason of the world to the caprices of weak and
giddy men.
But, as no one of us men can dispense with public or private faith, or
with any other tie of moral obligation, so neither can any number of
us. The number engaged in crimes, instead of turning them into laudable
acts, only augments the quantity and intensity of the guilt. I am
well aware that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme
disrelish to be told of their duty. This is of course, because every
duty is a limitation of some power. Indeed arbitrary power is so much
to the depraved taste of the vulgar, of the vulgar of every description,
that almost all the dissensions, which lacerate the commonwealth, are
not concerning the manner in which it is to be exercised, but concerning
the hands in which it is to be placed. Somewhere they are resolved to
have it. Whether they desire it to be vested in the many or the few,
depends with most men upon the chance which they imagine they themselves
may have of partaking in the exercise of that arbitrary sway, in the one
mode or in the other.
It is not necessary to teach men to thirst after power. But it is very
expedient that by moral instruction, they should be taught, and by their
civil constitutions they should be compelled, to put many restrictions
upon the immoderate exercise of it, and the inordinate desire. The best
method of obtaining these two great points forms the important, but at
the same time the difficult, problem to the true statesman. He thinks
of the place in which political power is to be lodged, with no other
attention, than as it may render the more or the less practicable,
its salutary restraint, and its prudent direction. For this reason no
legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of
active power in the hands of the multitude: because there it admits of
no control no regulation, no steady direction whatsoever. The people
are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control
together is contradictory and impossible.
As the exorbitant exercise of power cannot, under popular sway, be
effectually restrained, the other great object of political arrangement,
the means of abating an excessive desire of it, is in such a state still
worse provided for. The democratic commonwealth is the foodful nurse of
ambition. Under the other forms it meets with many restraints. Whenever,
in states which have had a democratic basis, the legislators have
endeavoured to put restraints upon ambition, their methods were as
violent, as in the end they were ineffectual: as violent indeed as any
the most jealous despotism could invent. The ostracism could not very
long save itself, and much less the state which it was meant to guard,
from the attempts of ambition, one of the natural, inbred, incurable
distempers of a powerful democracy.