HKB
When elections occur frequently, this recurrence keeps society in a perpetual state of feverish excitement, and imparts a continual instability to public affairs.
Thus, on the one hand, the state is exposed to the perils of a revolution, on the other, to perpetual mutability; the former system threatens the very existence of the government, the latter is an obstacle to all steady and consistent policy. The Americans have preferred the second of these evils to the first; but they were led to this conclusion by their instinct much more than by their reason; for a taste for variety is one of the characteristic passions of democracy. An extraordinary mutability has, by this means, been introduced into their legislation.
Many of the Americans consider the instability of their laws as a necessary consequence of a system whose general results are beneficial. But no one in the United States affects to deny the fact of this instability, or to contend that it is not a great evil.
Hamilton, after having demonstrated the utility of a power which might prevent, or which might at least impede, the promulgation of bad laws, adds: "It may perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones, and may be used to the one purpose as well as to the other. But this objection will have but little weight with those who can properly estimate the mischiefs of that inconstancy and mutability in the laws which form the greatest blemish in the character and genius of our government."--(Federalist, No. 73.)
And again, in No. 62 of the same work, he observes: "The facility and excess of law-making seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable.... The mischievous effects of the mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members, would fill a volume; every new election in the states is found to change one half of the representatives. From this change of men must proceed a change of opinions and of measures which forfeits the respect and confidence of nations, poisons the blessings of liberty itself, and diminishes the attachment and reverence of the people toward a political system which betrays so many marks of infirmity."
Jefferson himself, the greatest democrat whom the democracy of America has as yet produced, pointed out the same evils.
"The instability of our laws," he said in a letter to Madison, "is really a very serious inconvenience. I think we ought to have obviated it by deciding that a whole year should always be allowed to elapse between the bringing in of a bill and the final passing of it. It should afterward be discussed and put to the vote without the possibility of making any alteration in it; and if the circumstances of the case required a more speedy decision, the question should not be decided by a simple majority, but by a majority of at least two thirds of both houses."
PUBLIC OFFICERS UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE DEMOCRACY OF AMERICA.
Simple Exterior of the American public Officers.--No official Costume.--All public Officers are remunerated.--Political Consequences of this System.--No public Career exists in America.--Result of this.