is not strongly interested in supporting your privileges, you will
certainly lose them. If you are about to trust your liberties with people
whom it is necessary to bind by stipulation, that they shall not keep a
standing army, your stipulation is not worth even the trouble of writing.
No bill of rights ever yet bound the supreme power longer than the
_honeymoon_ of a new married couple, unless the _rulers were interested_
in preserving the rights; and in that case they have always been ready
enough to declare the rights, and to preserve them when they were
declared.--The famous English _Magna Charta_ is but an act of parliament,
which every subsequent parliament has had just as much constitutional
power to repeal and annul, as the parliament which made it had to pass it
at first. But the security of the nation has always been, that their
government was so formed, that at least _one branch_ of their legislature
must be strongly interested to preserve the rights of the nation.

You have a bill of rights in Connecticut (i. e.) your legislature many
years since enacted that the subjects of this state should enjoy certain
privileges. Every assembly since that time, could, by the same authority,
enact that the subjects should enjoy none of those privileges; and the
only reason that it has not long since been so enacted, is that your
legislature were as strongly interested in preserving those rights as any
of the subjects; and this is your only security that it shall not be so
enacted at the next session of assembly: and it is security enough.

Your General Assembly under your present constitution are supreme. They
may keep troops on foot in the most profound peace, if they think proper.
They have heretofore abridged the trial by jury in some cases, and they
can again in all. They can restrain the press, and may lay the most
burdensome taxes if they please, and who can forbid? But still the people
are perfectly safe that not one of these events shall take place so long
as the members of the General Assembly are as much interested, and
interested in the same manner, as the other subjects.

On examining the new proposed constitution, there can be no question but
that there is authority enough lodged in the proposed Federal Congress, if
abused, to do the greatest injury. And it is perfectly idle to object to
it, that there is no bill of rights, or to propose to add to it a
provision that a trial by jury shall in no case be omitt