and the part which men take, one way or other, will
serve to discriminate their characters and their principles. Until the
matter is decided, the country will remain in its present confusion. For
while a system of administration is attempted, entirely repugnant to the
genius of the people, and not conformable to the plan of their
government, everything must necessarily be disordered for a time, until
this system destroys the constitution, or the constitution gets the
better of this system.

There is, in my opinion, a peculiar venom and malignity in this
political distemper beyond any that I have heard or read of. In former
times the projectors of arbitrary government attacked only the liberties
of their country; a design surely mischievous enough to have satisfied a
mind of the most unruly ambition. But a system unfavorable to freedom
may be so formed, as considerably to exalt the grandeur of the state;
and men may find, in the pride and splendor of that prosperity, some
sort of consolation for the loss of their solid privileges. Indeed the
increase of the power of the state has often been urged by artful men,
as a pretext for some abridgment of the public liberty. But the scheme
of the junto under consideration, not only strikes a palsy into every
nerve of our free constitution, but in the same degree benumbs and
stupefies the whole executive power: rendering government in all its
grand operations languid, uncertain, ineffective; making ministers
fearful of attempting, and incapable of executing any useful plan of
domestic arrangement, or of foreign politics. It tends to produce
neither the security of a free government, nor the energy of a monarchy
that is absolute. Accordingly the crown has dwindled away, in proportion
to the unnatural and turgid growth of this excrescence on the court.

The interior ministry are sensible, that war is a situation which sets
in its full light the value of the hearts of a people; and they well
know, that the beginning of the importance of the people must be the end
of theirs. For this reason they discover upon all occasions the utmost
fear of everything, which by possibility may lead to such an event. I do
not mean that they manifest any of that pious fear which is backward to
commit the safety of the country to the dubious experiment of war. Such
a fear, being the tender sensation of virtue, excited, as it is
regulated, by reason, frequently shows itself in a seasonable boldness,
wh