I published my thoughts on that Constitution, that my countrymen might
be enabled to estimate the wisdom of the plans which were held out to
their imitation. I conceived that the true character of those plans
would be best collected from the committee appointed to prepare them. I
thought that the scheme of their building would be better comprehended
in the design of the architects than in the execution of the masons. It
was not worth my reader's while to occupy himself with the alterations
by which bungling practice corrects absurd theory. Such an investigation
would be endless: because every day's past experience of
impracticability has driven, and every day's future experience will
drive, those men to new devices as exceptionable as the old, and which
are no otherwise worthy of observation than as they give a daily proof
of the delusion of their promises and the falsehood of their
professions. Had I followed all these changes, my letter would have been
only a gazette of their wanderings, a journal of their march from error
to error, through a dry, dreary desert, unguided by the lights of
Heaven, or by the contrivance which wisdom has invented to supply their
place.

I am unalterably persuaded that the attempt to oppress, degrade,
impoverish, confiscate, and extinguish the original gentlemen and landed
property of a whole nation cannot be justified under any form it may
assume. I am satisfied beyond a doubt, that the project of turning a
great empire into a vestry, or into a collection of vestries, and of
governing it in the spirit of a parochial administration, is senseless
and absurd, in any mode or with any qualifications. I can never be
convinced that the scheme of placing the highest powers of the state in
church-wardens and constables and other such officers, guided by the
prudence of litigious attorneys and Jew brokers, and set in action by