Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness
insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when
trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its
only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved
to a certain degree. This indeed is not all that is necessary, though it be essentially
necessary. An amendment of our constitution must here come in aid of the public
education. The inuence over government must be shared among all the people. If
every individual which composes their mass participates of the ultimate authority,
the government will be safe; because the corrupting the whole mass will exceed any
private resources of wealth: and public ones cannot be provided but by levies on the
people. In this case every man would have to pay his own price. The government
of Great-Britain has been corrupted, because but one man in ten has a right to
vote for members of parliament. The sellers of the government therefore get ninetenths
of their price clear. It has been thought that corruption is restrained by
conning the right of surage to a few of the wealthier of the people: but it would
be more eectually restrained by an extension of that right to such numbers as
would bid deance to the means of corruption.
Lastly, it is proposed, by a bill in this revisal, to begin a public library and
gallery, by laying out a certain sum annually in books, paintings, and statues.
Query XVII
The dierent religions received into that state?
The rst settlers in this country were emigrants from England, of the English
church, just at a point of time when it was ushed with complete victory over the
religious of all other persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the powers of
making, administering, and executing the laws, they shewed equal intolerance in
this country with their Presbyterian brethren, who had emigrated to the northern
government. The poor Quakers were ying from persecution in England. They
cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom;
but they found them free only for the reigning sect. Several acts of the Virginia
assembly of 1659, 1662, and 1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have
their children baptized; had prohibited the unlawful assembling of Quakers; had
made it penal for any master of a vessel to bring a Quaker into the state; had ordered
those already here, and such as should come thereafter, to be imprisoned till they
should abjure the country; provided a milder punishment for their rst and second
return, but death for their third; had inhibited all persons from suering their
meetings in or near their houses, entertaining them individually, or disposing of
books which supported their tenets. If no capital execution took place here, as did
in New-England, it was not owing to the moderation of the church, or spirit of the
legislature, as may be inferred from the law itself; but to historical circumstances
which have not been handed down to us. The Anglicans retained full possession of
the country about a century. Other opinions began then to creep in, and the great
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