To illustrate this argument, I will repeat a position which I lately advanced, namely, that the substance of a constitution may be effectually destroyed, and yet its form may remain unaltered. England illustrates it. The Government of that country took its present form in the thirteenth century; but its aspect in substance has been extremely different at different periods, under the same form. Without taking time to mark the changes in substance which have taken place under the form of Kings, Lords, and Commons, it will suffice to cast our eyes upon the present state of that Government. What are now its chief and substantial energies? Armies, debt, executive patronage, penal laws, and corporations. These are the modern energies or substance of the English monarchy; to the ancient English monarchy they were unknown. Of the ancient, they were substantial abuses; for, whether these modern energies are good or bad, they overturned the ancient monarchy substantially, without altering its form. Under every change of Administration these abuses proceeded. The _outs_ were clamorous for preserving the constitution, as they called it; for, though divorced from its administration, the hope of getting in again caused them to maintain abuses, by which their avarice or ambition might be gratified upon the next turn of the wheel; just as in Prussia, where divorces are common, nothing is more usual than for late husbands to affect a violent passion for a former wife, if she carried off from him a good estate! And the _ins_, fearing the national jealousy, and the prepossession against amending the form of Government, and meeting new abuses by new remedies, brought no relief to the nation. So that under every change of men abuses proceeded.
The solution of this effect exists in the species of political craft similar to priestcraft. Mankind were anciently deprived of their religious liberty by a dissemination of a fanatical zeal for some idol; in times of ignorance, this idol was of physical structure; and when that fraud was detected, a metaphysical idol in the shape of a tenet or dogma was substituted for it, infinitely more pernicious in its effects, because infinitely more difficult of detection. The same system has been pursued by political craft. It has ever labored to excite the same species of idolatry and superstition for the same reason, namely, to conceal its own frauds and vices. Sometimes it sets up a physical, at others a metaphysical idol, as the object of vulgar superstition. Of one, the former “Grand Monarch of France;” of the other, the present “Church and State” tenet of England is an evidence. And if our constitution is to be made like the “Church and State” tenet of England, a metaphysical political idol, which it will be sacrilege to amend, even for the sake of saving both that and the national liberty; and if, like that tenet, it is to be exposed to all the means which centuries may suggest to vicious men for its substantial destruction, it is not hard to imagine that it also may become a monument of the inefficacy of unalterable forms of political law to correct avarice and ambition in the new and multifarious shapes they are for ever assuming.