of the most sensible and
approved political authors, and to show you that its principles, and the
exercise of them, will be dangerous to your liberty and happiness.

Although I am conscious that this is an arduous undertaking, yet I will
perform it to the best of my ability.

The freedom, equality and independence which you enjoyed by nature,
induced you to consent to a political power. The same principles led you
to examine the errors and vices of a British superintendence, to divest
yourselves of it, and to reassume a new political shape. It is
acknowledged that there are defects in this, and another is tendered to
you for acceptance; the great question then, that arises on this new
political principle, is, whether it will answer the ends for which it is
said to be offered to you, and for which all men engage in political
society, to wit, the preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates.

The recital, or premises on which the new form of government is erected,
declares a consolidation or union of all the thirteen parts, or states,
into one great whole, under the firm of the United States, for all the
various and important purposes therein set forth. But whoever seriously
considers the immense extent of territory comprehended within the limits
of the United States, together with the variety of its climates,
productions, and commerce, the difference of extent, and number of
inhabitants in all; the dissimilitude of interest, morals, and politics,
in almost every one, will receive it as an intuitive truth, that a
consolidated republican form of government therein, can never _form a
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, promote the
general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to you and your
posterity_, for to these objects it must be directed: this unkindred
legislature therefore, composed of interests opposite and dissimilar in
their nature, will in its exercise, emphatically be like a house divided
against itself.

The governments of Europe have taken their limits and form from
adventitious circumstances, and nothing can be argued on the motive of
agreement from them; but these adventitious political principles, have
nevertheless produced effects that have attracted the attention of
philosophy, which have established axioms in the science of politics
therefrom, as irrefragable as any in Euclid. It is natural, says
Montesquieu, _to a republic to have only a small territory, othe