If the periods be separated by short
intervals, the measures to be reviewed and rectified will have been of
recent date, and will be connected with all the circumstances which tend
to vitiate and pervert the result of occasional revisions. If the
periods be distant from each other, the same remark will be applicable
to all recent measures; and in proportion as the remoteness of the
others may favor a dispassionate review of them, this advantage is
inseparable from inconveniences which seem to counterbalance it. In the
first place, a distant prospect of public censure would be a very feeble
restraint on power from those excesses to which it might be urged by the
force of present motives. Is it to be imagined that a legislative
assembly, consisting of a hundred or two hundred members, eagerly bent
on some favorite object, and breaking through the restraints of the
Constitution in pursuit of it, would be arrested in their career, by
considerations drawn from a censorial revision of their conduct at the
future distance of ten, fifteen, or twenty years? In the next place, the
abuses would often have completed their mischievous effects before the
remedial provision would be applied.
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