In
your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with
the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed;
you had all that combination and all that opposition of interests, you
had that action and counteraction, which, in the natural and in the
political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws
out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting
interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in
our present Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate
resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of
necessity; they make all change a subject of _compromise_, which
naturally begets moderation; they produce _temperaments_, preventing the
sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations, and rendering all
the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many,
forever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests,
general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in
the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by the weight of a
real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping
and starting from their allotted places.
You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to
act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had
everything to begin anew.
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