This system of combination and conspiracy would go on, until at
length whole states and a whole nation would become divided into
two great litigating parties, each party composed of several
smaller bodies, having their separate suits, but all confederating
for the purpose of making up the necessary majority in each case.
The individuals composing each of these two great parties, would
at length become so accustomed to acting together, and so well
acquainted with each others' schemes, and so mutually
dependent upon each others' fidelity for success, that they would
become organized as permanent associations; bound together by
that kind of honor that prevails among thieves; and pledged by
all their interests, sympathies, and animosities, to mutual
fidelity, and to unceasing hostility to their opponents; and
exerting all their arts and all their resources of threats,
injuries, promises, and bribes, to drive or seduce from the other
party enough to enable their own to retain or acquire such a
majority as would be necessary to gain their own suits, and
defeat the suits of their opponents. All the wealth and talent of
the country would become enlisted in the service of these rival
associations; and both would at length become so compact, so well
organized, so powerful, and yet always so much in need of
recruits, that a private person would be nearly or quite unable
to obtain justice in the most paltry suit with his neighbor,
except on the condition of joining one of these great litigating
associations, who would agree to carry through his cause, on
condition of his assisting them to carry through all the others,
good and bad, which they had already undertaken. If he refused
this, they would threaten to make a similar offer to his
antagonist, and suffer their whole numbers to be counted against
him.
Now this picture is no caricature, but a true and honest
likeness. And such a system of administering justice, would be no
more false, absurd, or atrocious, than that system of working by
majorities, which seeks to accomplish, by legislation, the same
ends which, in the case supposed, would be accomplished by
judicial decisions.
Again, the doctrine that the minority ought to submit to the will
of the majority, proceeds, not upon the principle that government
is formed by voluntary association, and for an agreed purpose, on
the part of all who contribute to its support, but upon the
presumption that all government must be practically a state of
war and plunder between opposing parties; and that in order to
save blood, and prevent mutual extermination, the parties come to
an agreement that they will count their respective numbers
periodically, and the one party shall then be permitted quietly
to rule and plunder, (restrained only by their own discretion,)
and the other submit quietly to be ruled and plundered, until the
time of the next enumeration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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