. The conservative body you propose
might be so constituted, as, while it would be an admirable sedative in
a variety of smaller cases, might also be a valuable sentinel and check
on the liberticide views of an ambitious individual. I am friendly to
this idea. But the true barriers of our liberty in this country are our
State governments: and the wisest conservative power ever contrived by
man, is that of which our Revolution and present government found us
possessed. Seventeen distinct States, amalgamated into one as to their
foreign concerns, but single and independent as to their internal
administration, regularly organized with a legislature and governor
resting on the choice of the people, and enlightened by a free press,
can never be so fascinated by the arts of one man, as to submit
voluntarily to his usurpation. Nor can they be constrained to it by any
force he can possess. While that may paralyze the single State in which
it happens to be encamped, sixteen others, spread over a country of
two thousand miles diameter, rise up on every side, ready organized for
deliberation by a constitutional legislature, and for action by their
governor, constitutionally the commander of the militia of the State,
that is to say, of every man in it, able to bear arms; and that militia,
too, regularly formed into regiments and battalions, into infantry,
cavalry, and artillery, trained under officers general and subordinate,
legally appointed, always in readiness, and to whom they are already
in habits of obedience. The republican government of France was lost
without a struggle, because the party of '_un et indivisible_' had
prevailed: no provincial organizations existed to which the people
might rally under authority of the laws, the seats of the directory were
virtually vacant, and a small force sufficed to turn the legislature out
of their chamber and to salute its leader chief of the nation. But
with us, sixteen out of seventeen States rising in mass, under regular
organization and legal commanders, united in object and action by their
Congress, or, if that be in duresse, by a special convention, present
such obstacles to an usurper as for ever to stifle ambition in the first
conception of that object.

Dangers of another kind might more reasonably be apprehended from this
perfect and distinct organization, civil and military, of the States; to
wit, that certain States, from local and occasional discontents, might
attempt to