Gazette Of The United States

FOR THE GAZETTE OF THE UNITED STATES.

[CONCLUDED.]

CONGRESS has no armies—and if it had, our people might mock at force if that only was used to govern them. It must frame its laws on such principles as an enlightened public will approve: let the public then form its opinions calmly—lay facts and arguments before it. Those who do not choose to be calm may give vent to their passions in the Gazettes; a free press is a sluice-way which lets off the torrent: But do not blind the public with authority; do not stop the useful progress of enquiry by telling it it is too late, the trial is over, the point is adjudged by the State legislature; is there not danger that this decision of a State will make right opinions too hasty and wrong ones too obstinate, so as to render the former despicable and the latter pernicious?

Every man may judge for himself whether State resolutions will crowd narrow local prejudices into Congress, or whether they will secure us an administration upon liberal national principles. The public will judge too whether a State government is the most impartial judge of the conduct of Congress. It is best that a cause should not be carried for trial before a tribunal which is suspected to have an interest in giving judgment against the defendant.

I am proud of my country, because I know that the government of it is a free one, and I think it is well administered, but these blessings are lost to him whose mind is poisoned by suspicion. To vaporish women and hypochondriac men, even health is no blessing. If State resolutions and instructions convince him that he is governed by knaves in Congress who have bound liberty fast for slaughter, he is more to be pitied than a satisfied slave. He will even make a bad defender of that liberty which, though he values, he deems lost.

It cannot be denied that State resolutions may be used to pull down a government. When the national administration shall have become so corrupt and wicked as to be intolerable, this instrument of destruction may be employed with success. Perhaps some men in the State legislatures are of opinion that the proper time for beginning this work of destruction is already arrived.

AN ENQUIRER.