1170. CENTRALIZATION, Judiciary drives [continued].
It has long been my
opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression
(although I do not choose to put it
into a newspaper, nor like a Priam in armor to
offer myself as its champion), that the germ
of dissolution of our Federal Government is
in the constitution of the Federal Judiciary;
an irresponsible body (for impeachment is
scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity
by night and by day, gaining a little to-day and
a little to-morrow, and advancing its noiseless
step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction,
until all shall be usurped from the States, and
the government of all be consolidatee into
one. To this I am opposed; because, when all
government, domestic and foreign, in little as
in great things, shall be drawn to Washington
as the centre of all power, it will render
powerless the checks provided of one government
on another, and will become as venal
and oppressive as the government from which
we separated. It will be, as in Europe, where
every man must be either pike or gudgeon,
hammer or anvil. Our functionaries and theirs
are wares from the same workshop; made of
the same materials and by the same hand. If
the States look with apathy on this silent
descent of their government into the gulf which
is to swallow all, we have only to weep over
the human character formed uncontrollable but
by a rod of iron, and the blasphemers of man,
as incapable of self-government, become his
true historians.—
To C. Hammond. Washington ed. vii, 216.
(M.
1821)
