w much in them is cold truth, and
how much rhetorical exaggeration. Allowing some foundation to the
complaint, it is to no purpose that these people allege that their
government is a job in its administration. I am sure it is a job in its
constitution; nor is it possible a scheme of polity, which, in total
exclusion of the body of the community, confines (with little or no
regard to their rank or condition in life) to a certain set of favored
citizens the rights which formerly belonged to the whole, should not, by
the operation of the same selfish and narrow principles, teach the
persons who administer in that government to prefer their own
particular, but well-understood, private interest to the false and
ill-calculated private interest of the monopolizing company they belong
to. Eminent characters, to be sure, overrule places and circumstances. I
have nothing to say to that virtue which shoots up in full force by the
native vigor of the seminal principle, in spite of the adverse soil and
climate that it grows in. But speaking of things in their ordinary
course, in a country of monopoly there _can_ be no patriotism. There may
be a party spirit, but public spirit there can be none. As to a spirit
of liberty, still less can it exist, or anything like it. A liberty made
up of penalties! a liberty made up of incapacities! a liberty made up of
exclusion and proscription, continued for ages, of four fifths, perhaps,
of the inhabitants of all ranks and fortunes In what does such liberty
differ from the description of the most shocking kind of servitude?

But it will be said, in that country some people are free. Why, this is
the very description of despotism. _Partial freedom is privilege and
prerogative, and not liberty._ Liberty, such as deserves the name, is
an honest, equitable, diffusive, and impartial principle. It is a great
and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice. It
is the portion of the mass of the citizens, and not the haughty license
of some potent individual or some predominant faction.

If anything ought to be despotic in a country, it is its government;
because there is no cause of constant operation to make its yoke
unequal. But the dominion of a party must continually, steadily, and by
its very essence, lean upon the prostrate description. A constitution
formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very government, and to
overpower the people too, answers the purposes neither of g