--they will be more careful how they place power in base and
incapable hands. In their nomination to office, they will not appoint to
the exercise of authority as to a pitiful job, but as to a holy
function; not according to their sordid, selfish interest, nor to their
wanton caprice, nor to their arbitrary will; but they will confer that
power (which any man may well tremble to give or to receive) on those
only in whom they may discern that predominant proportion of active
virtue and wisdom, taken together and fitted to the charge, such as in
the great and inevitable mixed mass of human imperfections and
infirmities is to be found.

When they are habitually convinced that no evil can be acceptable,
either in the act or the permission, to Him whose essence is good, they
will be better able to extirpate out of the minds of all magistrates,
civil, ecclesiastical, or military, anything that bears the least
resemblance to a proud and lawless domination.

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the
commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is lest the temporary
possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received
from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act
as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it
amongst their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the
inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric
of their society: hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin
instead of an habitation,--and teaching these successors as little to
respect their contrivances as they had themselves respected the
institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of
changing the state as often and as much and in as many ways as there are
floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the
commonwealth would be broken; no one generation could link with the
other; men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

And first of all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of the human
intellect, which, with all its defects, redundancies, and errors, is the
collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice
with the infinite variety of human concerns, as a heap of old exploded
errors, would be no longer studied. Personal self-sufficiency and
arrogance (the certain attendants upon all those who have never
experienced a wisdom greater than their own) would usurp