If
this continues to be the ruling passion of our souls, the weaker
feeling of the mistaken enthusiast will be corrected, the Utopian
dreams of the scheming politician dissipated, and the complicated
intrigues of the demagogue rendered harmless. The spirit of
liberty is the sovereign balm for every injury which our
institutions may receive. On the contrary, no care that can be
used in the construction of our Government, no division of powers,
no distribution of checks in its several departments, will prove
effectual to keep us a free people if this spirit is suffered to
decay; and decay it will without constant nurture. To the neglect
of this duty the best historians agree in attributing the ruin of
all the republics with whose existence and fall their writings
have made us acquainted. The same causes will ever produce the
same effects, and as long as the love of power is a dominant
passion of the human bosom, and as long as the understandings of
men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon
their passions and prejudices, so long will the liberties of a
people depend on their own constant attention to its preservation.
The danger to all well-established free governments arises from
the unwillingness of the people to believe in its existence or
from the influence of designing men diverting their attention from
the quarter whence it approaches to a source from which it can
never come.
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