grant the general government those powers which the proposed constitution gives it in every case.[1] Had I been a greater friend to a standing army, and not quite so averse to expose your liberties to a soldiery, I do not believe the Landholder would have chose me for the object on whom to expend his artillery of falsehood.
That a system may enable government wantonly to exercise power over the militia, to call out an unreasonable number from any particular state without its permission, and to march them upon, and continue them in, remote and improper services; that the same system should enable the government totally to discard, render useless, and even disarm, the militia, when it would remove them out of the way of opposing its ambitious views, is by no means inconsistent, and is really the case in the proposed constitution. In both these respects it is, in my opinion, highly faulty, and ought to be amended. In the proposed system the general government has a power not only without the consent, but contrary to the will of the state government, to call out the whole of its militia, without regard to religious scruples, or any other consideration, and to continue them in service as long as it pleases, thereby subjecting the freemen of a whole state to martial law and reducing them to the situation of slaves. It has also, by another clause, the powers by which only the militia can be organized and armed, and by the neglect of which they may be rendered utterly useless and insignificant, when it suits the ambitious purposes of government. Nor is the suggestion unreasonable, even if it had been made, that the government might improperly oppress and harass the militia, the better to reconcile them to the idea of regular troops, who might relieve them from the burthen, and to render them less opposed to the measures it might be disposed to adopt for the purpose of reducing them to that state of insignificancy and uselessness. When the Landholder declared that ‘I contended the powers and authorities of the new constitution must destroy the liberties of the people,’ he for once stumbled on the truth, but even this he could not avoid coupling with an assertion utterly false. I never suggested that ‘the same powers
- ↑ According to this idea, I endeavored to obtain as an amendment to the system the following clause: ‘And whenever the legislature of the United States shall find it necessary that revenue shall be raised by direct taxation, having apportioned the same by the above rule, requisitions shall be made of the respective states to pay into the continental treasury their respective quotas within a time in the said requisition to be specified, and in case of any of the states failing to comply with such requisition, then, and then only, to have power to devise and pass acts directing the mode, and authorizing the same in the state failing therein.’ This was rejected, and that power, which I wished to have given the government only in this particular instance, is given to it without any restraint or limitation in every case.
