principles on

which it proceeds, we may

be allowed to hope that this will be the case with what we have ventured to name the art of exposition. Explanation has its principles as well as reasoning, or persuasion, or inductive inquiry; and an attentive examination of these principles, would undoubtedly conduct us to some results, valuable alike to those who give and to those who receive instruction.

CHAPTER 1.

ON THE PROPER OBJECT AND PROVINCE OF

GOVERNMENT.

THE general object for which government ought to exist, is the good of the community over which it presides. This is a proposition which scarcely requires proof. If government did not promote the welfare of the community, it must be either a useless or a mischievous institution. A despot may consider the end of government to be the gratification of his uncontrolled desires; the members of an oligarchy may consider it to be the preservation of that order of society which is essential to their own dignity and importance; but mankind at large can rationally regard it as no other than the common good.

But this description of the object of government, although accurate, is too general to convey much information. The welfare of the community is the proper end of many other institutions;

it

of schools, colleges, hospitals, and other beneficent establishments, which the mind of the reader will readily suggest to him without a particular enumeration here. What our present inquiry has to ascertain, is the specific end of government, - that which distinguishes it from other institutions. When the same ultimate purpose belongs to many different measures, pursuits, systems of action, or establishments, cannot form the distinction of any that distinction must be sought for in some proximate purpose, or, what amounts to the same thing, in the means or particular way in which the ulterior object is effected. Pecuniary profit, for example, is the common object of all trades; but they seek to attain their common end through the most various intermediate purposes; or, to change the expression, they employ the most various means, and it is by these means that they are discriminated. In cases where there is occasion in this manner to speak of a proximate and an ulterior purpose, it is useful to call the former the province, and the latter the object. Thus it is the object of the corn-dealer to make a profit; it is his province to buy and sell corn.

Adopting this phraseology for the sake of distinctness, we may say, that the proper object of

government is the good of the community; and we proceed to inquire what is its appropriate province.

If we look abroad into that society, for the benefit of which government is or ought to be intended, we shall see that by far the largest portion of the actions of mankind are of a private nature, springing from individual motives, and terminating in personal enjoyments, which no external party can know or appreciate. The routine of every-day exertions, the pursuits of business, the recreations of leisure, the intercourse of love and friendship, the tastes and habits of domestic life, all go on without any providential care on the part of the state. In the case of each individual, the chief blessings of life are attained without any assistance from government, either by his own solitary efforts, or by spontaneously uniting with other men in large or small associations, and in a thousand various ways, to attain advantages which his single arm is incompetent to reach. No other party can beneficially direct the greater number of his actions; no one can possess the same clear perception that he has of his own sources of enjoyment: none can be so vigilant in watching the circumstances which constitute his wretchedness or his felicity; none

so strenuous to guard against the one, or so alert to seize the other. He is at the helm of the vessel, in which his whole happiness is embarked; and the main direction of it can be undertaken by none so well acquainted with the course to be pursued as himself. For government to attempt to interfere with actions or sources of enjoyment, the regulation of which requires a perpetual knowledge of an evervarying train of personal circumstances, would be absurd.

While every individual must thus in the nature of the case be the main judge of his own welfare, and director of his own conduct, yet, in the intercourse of man with man, there are occasions continually arising, in which the desires and pursuits of one interfere with those of another, and call into action the rapacious and contentious spirit, which is so conspicuous a feature of our common nature. To adjust the conflicting claims thus engendered, the intervention of a third party is necessary. Many of these contests of passion and interest are repressed within reasonable bounds by tacit rules and moral sentiments, which inevitably spring up and pervade and actuate society. Society at large is in this case the third party. But there are contentions and dif