The best
method of obtaining these two great points forms the important, but at
the same time the difficult problem to the true statesman. He thinks of
the place in which political power is to be lodged with no other
attention than as it may render the more or the less practicable its
salutary restraint and its prudent direction. For this reason, no
legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of
active power in the hands of the multitude; because there it admits of
no control, no regulation, no steady direction whatsoever. The people
are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control
together is contradictory and impossible.
As the exorbitant exercise of power cannot, under popular sway, be
effectually restrained, the other great object of political arrangement,
the means of abating an excessive desire of it, is in such a state still
worse provided for. The democratic commonwealth is the foodful nurse of
ambition. Under the other forms it meets with many restraints. Whenever,
in states which have had a democratic basis, the legislators have
endeavored to put restraints upon ambition, their methods were as
violent as in the end they were ineffectual,--as violent, indeed, as any
the most jealous despotism could invent.
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