s arms, and so
has that property to dispose of.

The same necessity which secures the rights of person and property
against the malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines the form
and methods of governing, which are proper to each nation and to its
habit of thought, and nowise transferable to other states of society. In
this country we are very vain of our political institutions, which are
singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men,
from the character and condition of the people, which they still express
with sufficient fidelity,--and we ostentatiously prefer them to any
other in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be
wise in asserting the advantage in modern times of the democratic
form, but to other states of society, in which religion consecrated the
monarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is better for
us, because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better
with it. Born democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy,
which, to our fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also
relatively right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with the
spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects
which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good
men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal
the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages
has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?

The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear in
the parties, into which each State divides itself, of opponents and
defenders of the administration of the government. Parties are also
founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims
than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their
origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might as
wisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political party, whose
members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but
stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves.
Our quarrel with them begins when they quit this deep natural ground at
the bidding of some leader, and obeying personal considerations, throw
themselves into the maintenance and defence of points nowise belonging
to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst
we absolve the association from d