erty as well as of men without
property; property, therefore, even upon the experience already had,
is no more a criterion of character than it is of rights_. It will
sometimes happen that the minority are right, and the majority are
wrong, but as soon as experience proves this to be the case, the
minority will increase to a majority, and the error will reform itself
by the tranquil operation of freedom of opinion and equality of rights.
Nothing, therefore, can justify an insurrection, neither can it ever be
necessary where rights are equal and opinions free.

Taking then the principle of equal rights as the foundation of the
revolution, and consequently of the constitution, the organical part,
or the manner in which the several parts of the government shall be
arranged in the constitution, will, as is already said, fall within the
province of opinion.

Various methods will present themselves upon a question of this kind,
and tho' experience is yet wanting to determine which is the best,
it has, I think, sufficiently decided which is the worst. That is
the worst, which in its deliberations and decisions is subject to
the precipitancy and passion of an individual; and when the whole
legislature is crowded into one body it is an individual in mass. In all
cases of deliberation it is necessary to have a corps of reserve, and it
would be better to divide the representation by lot into two parts, and
let them revise and correct each other, than that the whole should sit
together, and debate at once.

Representative government is not necessarily confined to any one
particular form. The principle is the same in all the forms under which
it can be arranged. The equal rights of the people is the root from
which the whole springs, and the branches may be arranged as present
opinion or future experience shall best direct. As to that _hospital of
incurables_ (as Chesterfield calls it), the British house of peers,
it is an excrescence growing out of corruption; and there is no more
affinity or resemblance between any of the branches of a legislative
body originating from the right of the people, and the aforesaid
house of peers, than between a regular member of the human body and an
ulcerated wen.

As to that part of government that is called the _executive_, it is
necessary in the first place to fix a precise meaning to the word.

There are but two divisions into which power can be arranged. First,
that of willing or decreein