The discourses of John Locke concerning government demolished while they immortalized the work of Filmer, whose name and book are now remembered only to be detested. But the first principles of morals and politics, which have long been settled, acquire the authority of self-evident truths, which, when first discussed, may have been vehemently and portentously contested. John Locke, a kindred soul to Algernon Sydney, seven years after his death published an elaborate system of government, in which he declares the "false principles and foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and overthrown." Subsequently, he published an essay concerning the true original extent and end of civil government. "The principles," says Mr. Adams, "of Sydney and Locke constitute the foundation of the North American Declaration of Independence; and, together with the subsequent writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau, that of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and of the constitution of the United States." Neither of these constitutions separately, nor the two in combined harmony, can, without a gross and fraudulent perversion of language, be termed a _Democracy_. They are neither democracy, aristocracy, nor monarchy. They form together a mixed government, compounded not only of the three elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, but with a fourth added element, _Confederacy_. The constitution of the United States when adopted was so far from being considered as a democracy, that Patrick Henry charged it, in the Virginia Convention, with an awful squinting towards monarchy. The tenth number of the Federalist, written by James Madison, is an elaborate and unanswerable essay upon the vital and radical difference between a democracy and a republic. But it is impossible to disconnect the relation between names and things. When the anti-federal party dropped the name of Republicans to assume that of _Democrats_, their principles underwent a corresponding metamorphosis; and they are now the most devoted and most obsequious champions of executive power--the very life-guard of the commander of the armies and navies of this Union. The name of Democracy was assumed because it was discovered to be _very taking_ among the multitude; yet, after all, it is but the investment of the _multitude_ with absolute power. The constitutions of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are both the work of the people--one of the Union, the other of the State--not of the whole people by the phantom of universal suffrage, but of the whole people by that portion of them capable of contracting for the whole. They are not democracy, nor aristocracy, nor monarchy, but a compound of them all, of which democracy is the oxygen, or vital air, too pure in itself for human respiration, but which in the union of other elements, equally destructive in themselves and less pure, forms that