But, as no one of us men can dispense with public or private faith, or with any other tie of moral obligation, so neither can any number of us.  The number engaged in crimes, instead of turning them into laudable acts, only augments the quantity and intensity of the guilt.  I am well aware that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told of their duty.  This is of course; because every duty is a limitation of some power.  Indeed, arbitrary power is so much to the depraved taste of the vulgar, of the vulgar of every description, that almost all the dissensions which lacerate the commonwealth are not concerning the manner in which it is to be exercised, but concerning the hands in which it is to be placed.  Somewhere they are resolved to have it.  Whether they desire it to be vested in the many or the few depends with most men upon the chance which they imagine they themselves may have of partaking in the exercise of that arbitrary sway, in the one mode or in the other.

It is not necessary to teach men to thirst after power.  But it is very expedient that by moral instruction they should be taught, and by their civil constitutions they should be compelled, to put many restrictions upon the immoderate exercise of it, and the inordinate desire.  The best method of obtaining these two great points forms the important, but at the same time the difficult problem to the true statesman.  He thinks of the place in which political power is to be lodged with no other attention than as it may render the more or the less practicable its salutary restraint and its prudent direction.  For this reason, no legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of active power in the hands of the multitude; because there it admits of no control, no regulation, no steady direction whatsoever.  The people are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible.

As the exorbitant exercise of power cannot, under popular sway, be effectually restrained, the other great object of political arrangement, the means of abating an excessive desire of it, is in such a state still worse provided for.  The democratic commonwealth is the foodful nurse of ambition.  Under the other forms it meets with many restraints.  Whenever, in states which have had a democratic basis, the legislators have endeavored to put restraints upon ambition, their methods were as violent as in the end they were ineffectual,—­as violent, indeed, as any the most jealous despotism could invent.  The ostracism could not very long save itself, and much less the state which it was meant to guard, from the attempts of ambition,—­one of the natural, inbred, incurable distempers of a powerful democracy.