A spirit of innovation is
generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People
will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their
ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of
inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure
principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of
improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it
acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on
these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement,
grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional
policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we
transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which
we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions
of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed
down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political
system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the
order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a
permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the
disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great
mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is
never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable
constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall,
renovation, and progression.
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