The Americans formed another idea of the relations of the citizens with the Government when they placed these simple words at the head of their Constitution:--
"We, the people of the United States, for the purpose of forming a more perfect union, of establishing justice, of securing interior tranquillity, of providing for our common defence, of increasing the general well-being, and of securing the benefits of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, decree," &c.
Here there is no chimerical creation, no abstraction, from which the citizens may demand everything. They expect nothing except from themselves and their own energy.
If I may be permitted to criticise the first words of our Constitution, I would remark, that what I complain of is something more than a mere metaphysical subtilty, as might seem at first sight.
I contend that this personification of Government has been, in past times, and will be hereafter, a fertile source of calamities and revolutions.
There is the public on one side, Government on the other, considered as two distinct beings; the latter bound to bestow upon the former, and the former having the right to claim from the latter, all imaginable human benefits. What will be the consequence?
In fact, Government is not maimed, and cannot be so. It has two hands--one to receive and the other to give; in other words, it has a rough hand and a smooth one. The activity of the second is necessarily subordinate to the activity of the first. Strictly, Government may take and not restore. This is evident, and may be explained by the porous and absorbing nature of its hands, which always retain a part, and sometimes the whole, of what they touch. But the thing that never was seen, and never will be seen or conceived, is, that Government can restore more to the public than it has taken from it. It is therefore ridiculous for us to appear before it in the humble attitude of beggars. It is radically impossible for it to confer a particular benefit upon any one of the individualities which constitute the community, without inflicting a greater injury upon the community as a whole.
Our requisitions, therefore, place it in a dilemma.
If it refuses to grant the requests made to it, it is accused of weakness, ill-will, and incapacity. If it endeavours to grant them, it is obliged to load the people with fresh taxes--to do more harm than good, and to bring upon itself from another quarter the general displeasure.
Thus, the public has two hopes, and Government makes two promises--many benefits and no taxes. Hopes and promises, which, being contradictory, can never be realised.