ity of
many heads.

It is inhuman to talk of a million sterling a year, paid out of the
public taxes of any country, for the support of any individual, whilst
thousands who are forced to contribute thereto, are pining with want,
and struggling with misery. Government does not consist in a contrast
between prisons and palaces, between poverty and pomp; it is not
instituted to rob the needy of his mite, and increase the wretchedness
of the wretched.--But on this part of the subject I shall speak
hereafter, and confine myself at present to political observations.

When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any
individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every
kind of corruption generates and forms. Give to any man a million a
year, and add thereto the power of creating and disposing of places,
at the expense of a country, and the liberties of that country are no
longer secure. What is called the splendour of a throne is no other
than the corruption of the state. It is made up of a band of parasites,
living in luxurious indolence, out of the public taxes.

When once such a vicious system is established it becomes the guard and
protection of all inferior abuses. The man who is in the receipt of a
million a year is the last person to promote a spirit of reform, lest,
in the event, it should reach to himself. It is always his interest to
defend inferior abuses, as so many outworks to protect the citadel; and
on this species of political fortification, all the parts have such a
common dependence that it is never to be expected they will attack each
other.*[24]

Monarchy would not have continued so many ages in the world, had it not
been for the abuses it protects. It is the master-fraud, which shelters
all others. By admitting a participation of the spoil, it makes itself
friends; and when it ceases to do this it will cease to be the idol of
courtiers.

As the principle on which constitutions are now formed rejects all
hereditary pretensions to government, it also rejects all that catalogue
of assumptions known by the name of prerogatives.

If there is any government where prerogatives might with apparent safety
be entrusted to any individual, it is in the federal government of
America. The president of the United States of America is elected only
for four years. He is not only responsible in the general sense of the
word, but a particular mode is laid down in the constitution for t