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
endeavored 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.

But to return from this short digression,--which, however, is not wholly
foreign to the question of the effect of the will of the majority upon
the form or the existence of their society. I cannot too often recommend
it to the serious consideration of all men who think civil society to be
within the province of moral jurisdiction, that, if we owe to it any
duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and
will