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INFLUENCE WHICH THE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY HAS EXERCISED ON THE LAWS RELATING TO ELECTIONS.
When Elections are rare, they expose the State to a violent Crisis.—When they are frequent, they keep up a degree of feverish Excitement.—The Americans have preferred the second of these two Evils.—Mutability of the Laws.—Opinions of Hamilton and Jefferson on this Subject.
When elections recur at long intervals, the state is exposed to violent agitation every time they take place. Parties exert themselves to the utmost in order to gain a prize which is so rarely within their reach; and as the evil is almost irremediable for the the candidates who fail, the consequence of their disappointed ambition may prove most disastrous: if, on the other hand, the legal struggle can be repeated within a short space of time, the defeated parties take patience.
When elections occur frequently, this recurrence keeps society in a perpetual state of feverish excitement, and imparts a continual instability to public affairs.
Thus, on the one hand, the state is exposed to the perils of a revolution, on the other, to perpetual mutability; the former system threatens the very existence of the government, the latter is an obstacle to all steady and consistent policy. The Americans have preferred the second of these evils to the first; but they were led to this conclusion by their instinct much more than by their reason; for a taste for variety is one of the characteristic passions of democracy. An extraordinary mutability has, by this means, been introduced into their legislation.
Many of the Americans consider the instability of their laws as a necessary consequence of a system whose general results are beneficial. But no one in the United States affects to deny the fact of this instability, or to contend that it is not a great evil.
Hamilton, after having demonstrated the utility of a power which might prevent, or which might at least impede, the promulgation of bad laws, adds: “It may perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones, and may be used to the one purpose as well as to the other. But this objection will have but little weight with those who can properly estimate the mischiefs of that inconstancy and mutability in the laws
