7277. REPRESENTATION, Freedom and.—
To us is committed [by the Constitution]
the important task of proving by example
that a government, if organized in all
its parts on the representative principle, unadulterated
by the infusion of spurious elements,
if founded, not in the fears and follies
of man, but on his reason, on his sense of
right, on the predominance of the social over
his dissocial passions, may be so free as to
restrain him in no moral right, and so firm
as to protect him from every moral wrong.—
Reply to Vermont Address. Washington ed. iv, 418.
(W.
1801)
