There is no declaration of any kind to preserve the liberty of the press, &c.
5 Nor is liberty of conscience, or matrimony, or of burial of the dead; it is enough that congress have no power to prohibit either, and can have no temptation.
This objection is answered in that the states have all the power originally, and congress have only what the states grant them.
6 The judiciary of the United States is so constructed and extended as to absorb and destroy the judiciaries of the several states; thereby rendering law as tedious, intricate and expensive and justice as unattainable by a great part of the community, as in England and enable the rich to oppress and ruin the poor.
7 It extends only to objects and cases specified, and wherein the national peace or rights, or the harmony of the states are concerned, and not to controversies between citizens of the same state (except where they claim under grants of different states)
8 and
nothing hinders but the supreme federal court may be held in different districts, or in all the states, and that all the cases, except the few in which it has original and not appellate jurisdiction, may in the first instance be had in the state courts and those trials be final except in cases of great magnitude;
9 and the trials be by jury also in most or all the causes which were wont to be tried by them, as congress shall provide, whose appointment is security enough for their attention to the wishes and convenience of the people. In chancery courts juries are never used, nor are they proper in admiralty courts, which proceed not by municipal laws, which they may be supposed to understand, but by the civil law and law of nations.
Mr. Mason deems the president and senate's power to make treaties dangerous, because they become laws of the land. If the president and his proposed council had this power, or the president alone, as in Englandand other nations is the case would the danger be less? or is the representative branch suited to the making of treaties which are often intricate, and require much negotiation and secrecy?
10 The senate is objected to as having too much power, and bold unfounded assertions that they will destroy any balance in the government, and accomplish what usurpation they please upon the rights and liberties of the people; to which it may be answered they are elective and rotative, to the mass of the people; the populace can as well balance the senatorial branch there as in the states, and much better than in England, where the lords are hereditary, and yet the commons preserve their weight; but the state governments on which the constitution is built will forever be security enough to the people against aristocratic usurpations. The danger of the constitution is not aristocracy or monarchy, but anarchy. I intreat you, my fellow citizens, to read and examine the new constitution with candor; examine it for yourselves, you are most of you as learned as the objector, and certainly as able to judge of its virtues or vices as he is. To make the objections the more plausible, they are called The Objections of the Hon. George Mason, & . They may possibly be his, but be assured they were not those made in convention, and being directly against what he there supported in one instance, ought to caution you against giving any credit to the rest; his violent opposition to the powers given congress to regulate trade, was an open decided preference of all the world to you. A man governed by such narrow views and local prejudices, can never be trusted; and his pompous declarations in the House of Delegates in Virginia that no man was more federal than himself amounts to no more than this, "Make a federal government that will secure Virginia all her natural advantages, promote all her interests regardless of every disadvantage to the other states, and I will subscribe to it. It may be asked how I came by my information respecting Col. Mason's conduct in Convention, as the doors were shut? To this I answer, no delegate of the late convention will contradict my assertions, as I have repeatedly heard them made by others in presence ofseveral of them, who could not deny their truth. Whether the constitution in question will be adopted by the United States in our day is uncertain; but it is neither aristocracy or monarchy can grow out of it, so long as the present descent of landed estates last, and the mass of the people have as at present, a tolerable education; and were it ever so perfect a scheme of freedom, when we become ignorant, vicious, idle, and regardless of the education of our children, our liberties will be lost-we shall be fitted for slavery, and it will be an easy business to reduce us to obey one or more tyrants.