A respect for
truth, however, obliges us to remark, that they seem never for a moment
to have turned their eyes from the danger to liberty from the overgrown
and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate, supported and
fortified by an hereditary branch of the legislative authority. They
seem never to have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations,
which, by assembling all power in the same hands, must lead to the same
tyranny as is threatened by executive usurpations.
In a government where numerous and extensive prerogatives are placed in
the hands of an hereditary monarch, the executive department is very
justly regarded as the source of danger, and watched with all the
jealousy which a zeal for liberty ought to inspire. In a democracy,
where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative
functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular
deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their
executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some
favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter. But in a
representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully
limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the
legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, by a
supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its
own strength; which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions
which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of
pursuing the objects of its passions, by means which reason prescribes;
it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the
people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their
precautions.
Pages:
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514