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TEXAS STATE LIBRARY
or real talent, were to be rewarded; this country has not wanted, and this country will not want the means of rewarding all the service it ever will receive, and encouraging al the merit it ever will produce No coun- try since the foundation of society, hns been impoverished by that species of profusion While we view with mortification and abhorrence, this secret act of what we may fairly consider treachery, aimed to be covered under the guise of economy; we see him strew with the hand of profu- sion over his favorite indian field a sum sufficient to keep the Navy at least, in a situation for defence in time of need. There is more how- ever, in this favorite indian field, than appears on the surface - More of this anon The Government has provided at immense cost, all the buildings, safes, and fixtures, for the accommodation of its public officers. Is it economy then to abandon them and, gipsey like, rove over the country first to one point, then another and fit up old cast off buildings, at the expense of the people? Common sense can make the reply This great political empiric - this modern alchymist, has so highly concentrated the machinery of Government, that the whole paraphernalia of that abstruce science has been consolidated and crouded into a cracked knowledge-box, which he can, with ease, carry about upon his own shoulders. So now, all is to be changed; - all the pleas- ing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimi- lation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new empiricism. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas furnished from the ward-robe of moral imagination which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded, as a ridiculous, absurd and anti- quated fashion. Ill would our ancestors at the revolution have de- served their fame for wi~dom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble and precarious in its tenure, by breaking down all their defences and destroying all their resources, and preserved no other remedy against arbitrary power than civil confusion I am well aware that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told of their duty; this is of course, because every duty is a limitation of some power. Indeed arbitrary power is so much to the depraved taste of the vulgar, of the vulgar of every discription. that almost all the dissentions which lacerate the commonwealth are not concerning the manner in which it is to be exer- cised, but concerning the hands i.n which it is to be placed It is not necessary to teach men to thirst after po,rer : - hut it is very expedient, that by moral instruction they should be taught, and by their political constitutions they should be compelled, to put many restrictions upon the immoderate use of it When men in power are permitted to deviate from the constitutional chart, without immediate correction; the evil cannot possibly be estimated From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we st8er. His Excellencies proclamation denouncing the officers and crews of the Navy as pirates, whilst engaged on a cruise against our public enemy, thereby rendering them subject to the most ignominious deaths, with- out any authority other than an arbitrary and malignant will; - his
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