But they may be summed up in a few words. The causes lie in the
fruitless attempt to run a Republican Government upon an aristocratic
code of laws, and the remedy is to remodel the code by the principles of
the declaration, which should be made the inspiration of every
provision, as well as the key to its construction. I might enumerate the
special evils that have grown out of the error made in the
Constitution—the vicious legislation for which this error laid the
foundation—that the rule of the majority is not a Republican idea; that
“the majority” is another name for the despot; that minorities are
entitled to, and can be represented; I might show that the United States
is, after all, nothing but a confederation of equal and antagonistic
powers, and not a Federal Union; that Washington is more a place in
which representatives from the several States assemble to quarrel over
the spoils of office and to lay the ropes for the succession, than it is
the capital of a free and mighty people; that there is such a
contrariety of laws in the several States upon any given subject, that
it puzzles a Philadelphia lawyer to tell whether a given act is a crime,
a misdemeanour, or whether actionable at all in the different States; if
people be married in one State, whether they are so legally in any
other, or if divorced the same. I might show that taxation is unequal
and oppressive, and the revenue unjust; and if there were need of it,
which there is not, that official patronage is a polite name for public
plunder, and that the public service is a vast system of organized
corruption. Had the original error not been made, had the fountain been
kept pure, none of these baneful things could have been engrafted into
the system. But they have now obtained a root so deep that they can
never be exterminated save by uprooting the system. They are the Canada
thistles in the fertile meadow, that spread themselves until they absorb
the whole vitality of the soil and thrust out the useful harvest. These
thistles have spread and seeded in the government until they have thrust
out every honest servant of the people, and until one who has any care
for his reputation cannot afford to meddle with the government.