If government on paper were really useless and harmless, we should say nothing about it. But it is fraught with danger, first because we are apt to rely on it for safety and security of rights, and secondly because it rarely suits the occasion. Men and societies are endowed by Providence generally with sufficient knowledge and judgment to act correctly or prudently under circumstances as they arise; but they cannot foresee or provide for the future, nor lay down rules for other people's conduct. All platforms, resolutions, bills of rights and constitutions, are true in the particular, false in the general. Hence all legislation should be repealable, and those instruments are but laws. Fundamental principles, or the higher law, are secrets of nature which God keeps to himself. The vain attempt of "frequent recurrence to them," is but the act of the child who builds card houses, for the pleasure of knocking them down. Recurrence to fundamental principles and appeals to the higher law, are but the tocsin of revolution that may upset everything, but which will establish nothing, because no two men are agreed as to what the higher law, alias "fundamental principles," is.
Moses, and Lycurgus, and Solon, and Numa, built their institutions to last, enjoined it on the people never to change them, and threw around them the sanctity of religion, to ward off the sacrilegious hand of future innovation. "A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles," and the kicking down of card houses, was not part of their science of government. We have often thought, that of all the lost arts, the art of government was the only one whose loss we would deplore, or whose recovery is worth the pains of study and research.
To us it seems that "first causes," "fundamental principles," and the "higher law," mean one and the same thing: An "ignis fatuus," that it is dangerous to pursue, and hopeless to overtake.
We may be doing Mr. Jefferson injustice, in assuming that his "fundamental principles" and Mr. Seward's "higher law," mean the same thing; but the injustice can be very little, as they both mean just nothing at all, unless it be a determination to inaugurate anarchy, and to do all sorts of mischief. We refer the reader to the chapter on the "Declaration of Independence," &c., in our Sociology, for a further dissertation on the fundamental powder-cask abstractions, on which our glorious institutions _affect_ to repose. We say _affect_, because we are sure neither their repose nor their permanence would be disturbed by the removal of the counterfeit foundation.