y and atrocious
tyrants on their elevation to supreme power. So great, indeed, is
the fallibility of human nature, that the very best of us are apt
to deviate from that just mean, in the adherence to which
consists virtue. All governments, therefore, should provide
against this capital defect; they should be so constituted as not
only to have in view what should happen, but also what might;
possibilities should be contemplated as well as probabilities.
The power to do good should if possible be unlimited: the ability
to do evil, followed with the highest responsibility, and
restrained by a moral certainty of punishment. An authority such
as the governor of this colony possesses, might be tolerated
under a despotic government; but it is a disgrace to one that
piques itself on its freedom. What plea can be urged for
encouraging excesses in our possessions abroad, that would be
visited with condign punishment in our courts at home? Are those
who quit the habitations of their fathers, to extend the limits
and resources of the empire, deserving of no better recompence
than a total suspension of the rights and liberties which their
ancestors have bequeathed them? Are they on their arrival in
these remote shores, to meet with no one of the institutions,
which they have been taught to cherish and to reverence? If the
want, indeed, of these institutions, of which so many centuries
have attested the wisdom, had as yet been productive of no evil,
there might be some excuse offered for the withholding of them;
but after such a scandalous abuse of authority, the colonists
expected, and had a right to expect, that no subsequent governor
would have been appointed without the intervention of some
controlling power, which, while it should tend to strengthen the
execntive in the due discharge of its functions, might at the
same time protect the subject in the legitimate exercise and
enjoyment of his private and personal rights. Never was there a
period since the foundation of the colony, when the impolicy of
its present form of government was so strikingly manifest; and
never, perhaps, will there be an occasion, when the establishment
of a house of assembly, and of trial by jury, would have been
hailed with such enthusiastic joy and gratitude: and accordingly
the disappointment of the colonists was extreme, when on the
arrival of Governor Macquarie, it was found that the same unwise
and unconstitutional power, which had been the cause