Corruption begins whenever public authority creates private opportunity; whenever the advancement of a family becomes entwined with the advancement of the state; whenever men conclude that prosperity depends less upon industry than upon proximity to power.
A republic cannot long endure when men learn that law is for enemies, power is for friends, and wealth is for the household of the magistrate. For then corruption ceases to be an offence. It becomes the method of government.
Some will say: The people chose him.
So they did.
But election is not absolution. A free people may choose a magistrate; they do not thereby crown a proprietor. No ballot grants one man title to the treasury, the courts, the commissions, the pardons, the contracts, the regulators, and the public reputation of the United States.
These practices need not abolish elections to undermine liberty. They need only persuade citizens that justice is no longer blind, that fortune follows favor, and that government serves particular men before it serves the public.
Should such sentiments become established among a free people, the Constitution itself may remain written upon the page, yet its animating spirit shall already have departed.
No republic is sold all at once.
It is sold by license, by favor, by appointment, by contract, by pardon, by silence, by excuse, and by the cowardly hope that someone else will object first.
It therefore becomes every citizen, in Philadelphia, Boston, or any free commonwealth, not from hatred toward one man but from love toward posterity, to insist that no magistrate, however celebrated, however successful, however beloved, shall be permitted to convert the powers entrusted for the public good into engines of private fortune.
The question is not whether the king has returned in name. It is whether we have permitted his habits to return in practice.
And if the answer is yes, then the question before us is not merely whether a people shall declare themselves independent.
It is whether they shall remain worthy of independence.