appear to be given, with indignation, and insist that he should first procure, and properly attempt, the necessary ingredients, since after the fatal draught was once received into your bowels, it would be too late should the antidote prove unattainable, and death must ensue. With the same indignation ought you, my fellow citizens, to reject the advice of those political quacks, who under pretence of healing the disorders of our present government, would urge you rashly to gulp down a constitution, which in its present form, unaltered and unamended, would be as certain death to your liberty, as arsenic could be to your bodies. LUTHER MARTIN. _Baltimore, March 25, 1788._ Luther Martin, VI. The Maryland Journal, (Number 1026) FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 1788. Number IV. TO THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND. If those, my fellow citizens, to whom the administration of our government was about to be committed, had sufficient wisdom never to err, and sufficient goodness always to consult the true interest of the governed, and if we could have a proper security that their successors should to the end of time be possessed of the same qualifications, it would be impossible that power could be lavished upon them with too liberal a hand. Power absolute and unlimited, united with unerring wisdom and unbounded goodness, is the government of the Deity of the universe. But remember, my fellow citizens, that the persons to whom you are about to delegate authority are and will be weak, erring mortals, subject to the same passions, prejudices and infirmities with yourselves; and let it be deeply engraven on your hearts, that from the first history of government to the present time, if we begin with Nimrod and trace down the rulers of nations to those who are now invested with supreme power, we shall find few, very few, who have made the beneficent Governor of the universe the model of their conduct, while many are they who, on the contrary, have imitated the demons of the darkness. We have no right to expect that our rulers will be more wise, more virtuous, or more perfect than those of other nations have been, or that they will not be equally under the influence of ambition, avarice and all that train of baleful passions, which have so generally proved the curse of our unhappy race. We must consider mankind such as they really are,—such as experience has shown them to be heretofore, and bids us expect to find them hereafter,—and not suffer ourselves to be misled by interested deceivers or enthusiastick visionaries; and therefore in forming a system of government, to delegate no greater power than is clearly and certainly necessary, ought to be the first principle with every people who are influenced by reason and a regard for their safety, and in doing this, they ought most solicitously to endeavour so to qualify even that power, by such checks and restraints, as to produce a perfect responsibility in those who are to exercise it, and prevent them from its