286. ALIEN AND SEDITION LAWS, Tyrannical.—
If the Alien and Sedition Acts
should stand, these conclusions would flow
from them: that the General Government
may place any act they think proper on the
list of crimes, and punish it themselves
whether enumerated or not enumerated by
the Constitution as cognizable by them: that
they may transfer its cognizance to the President,
or any other person, who may himself
be the accuser, counsel, judge and jury,
whose suspicion may be the evidence, his
order the sentence, his officer the executioner,
and his breast the sole record of the transaction:
that a very numerous and valuable description
of the inhabitants of these states
being, by this precedent, reduced, as outlaws,
to the absolute dominion of one man, and
the barrier of the Constitution thus swept
away from us all, no rampart now remains
against the passions and the powers of a majority
in Congress to protect from a like exportation,
or other more grievous punishment,
the minority of the same body, the
legislatures, judges, governors, and counsellors
of the States, nor their other peaceable
inhabitants, who may venture to reclaim the
constitutional rights and liberties of the
States and people, or who for other causes,
good or bad, may be obnoxious to the views,
or marked by the suspicions of the President,
or be thought dangerous to his or their
election, or other interests, public or personal:
that the friendless alien has indeed
been selected as the safest subject of a
first experiment; but the citizen will soon
follow, or rather, has already followed,
for already has a Sedition Act marked
him as its prey: that these and successive
acts of the same character, unless arrested
at the threshold, necessarily drive these
States into revolution and blood, and
will furnish new calumnies against republican
government, and new pretexts for those
who wish it to be believed that man cannot
be governed but by a rod of iron.—
Kentucky Resolutions. Washington ed. ix, 469.
Ford ed., vii, 302.
(1798)
