Posted on 10/25/2002 7:00:46 AM PDT by William McKinley
[Pages 71-73]
Jus cuique, the golden rule, is all the equality that can be supported or defended by reason or common sense... My 'Defence of the Constitutions' and 'Discourses on Davila' were the cause of that immense unpopularity which fell like the tower of Siloam upon me. Your steady defence of democratical principles, and your invariable favorable opinion of the French revolution, laid the foundation for your unbounded popularity. Sic transit gloria mundi.John Adams, son of a Braintree farmer, let his enemy persuade him to write a book. A Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America was the book, and Thomas Jefferson was the enemy-- a friend at the moment, however, then for long years an adversary, and toward the end a friend once more. Shocked at the fancies of Lafayette, Rochfoucauld, Condorcet, and Franklin, condemning their ignorance of history, this severe and forthright little Massachusettes lawyer spent the greater part of his life declaring, with perfect indifference to popularity, that freedom can be achieved and retained only by sober men who take humanity as it is, not as humanity as it should be. His learning and his courage made him great, and he became the founder of true conservatism in America. Thirteen years after Adams had lost the Presidency of the United States, he wrote the passage above, without acrimony, to the man who had beaten him. In general, the Federalists were a gloomy set; and Adams underestimated the influence his ideas and his example would exert upon future generations in America. Despite grave faults, the United States remain today a nation strong and prosperous, where proterty and liberty are tolerably secure. John Adams, who entertained no exaggerated opinion of the wisdom and virtue possessed by the mass of mankind, might have been reasonably satisfied with this accomplishment. More than anyone else, he taught the value of good and practical laws, transcending the passions of the hour. And more than anyone else, he kept the American government one of laws, not of men.
By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogativves. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend over America powers of taxation and administration never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour of compromise had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they declared their independence. Thus men essentially conservative found themselves triuphant rebels, and were compelled to reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an independence harldy anticipated. It was a profound problem: the Republicans, Jefferson being chief among them, endeavored to solve it by the application of a priori concepts, and came to sympathize with French egalitarian theories. Their opponents, the Federalists, appealed to the lessons of history, the legacy of British liberties, and the guarentees of prescriptive constitutions.
These Federalists, the first conservative faction in an independent America, found themselves menaced by two radicalisms: one of French origins, the same enormous social and intellectual convulsion that Burke confronted; the other a growth in part native and in part English, the levelling agrarian republicanism of which Jefferson was the chief representative, zealous to abolish entail, primogeniture, church establishments, and all the vestiges of aristocracy,
[entail: to restrict (property) by limiting the inheritance to the owner's lineal descendants or to a particular class thereof]and to oppose centralization, strong government, public debt, and the military. The Federalists tended to be the party of the towns, the commercial and manufacturing interests, and the creditors; the Republicans, the party of the country, the agricultural interests, and the debtors. Shay's Rebellion, and later the Whiskey Rebellion, gave the Federalists a highly unpleasant notion of the power and aspirations of their opponents, inspiring in them an almost desperate resolution to oppose local radicalism by means of conservative consolidation.primogeniture: an exclusive right of inheritance belonging to the eldest son. WM ]
[More on Shays Rebellion here
[Pages 103-108]
Edmund Burke and John Adams were liberals in the sense that they believed in prescriptive liberties, though not in abstract liberty. They were individualists in the sense that they believed in individuality-- diversity of human character, variety of human action-- although they abhorred the apotheosis of Individualism as the supreme moral principle. When the doctrinaire liberals repudiated the idea of Providence, they retained only a moral concept shorn of religious sanctions and left to wither into mere selfishness. Similarly, when the doctrinaire liberals severed political freedom from that political complexity which shelters liberty, they unwittingly hacked the roots of "inalienable rights". Burke touched upon all this in 1790, but Adams, in Defence, had anticipated him.
Turgot, Adams wrote, was blind to the truth that Liberty, practically speaking, is made of particular local and personal liberties; Turgot was ignorant of the great prerequisite for just government, which is recognition of the local rights and interests and diversities, and their safeguarding in the state. Turgot was for "collecting all authority in one centre, the nation" (Turgot's own words). "It is easily understood," Adams commented, "how all authority may be collected into 'one centre' in a despot or monarch; but how it may be done when the centre is to be the nation, is more difficult to comprehend...If, after the pains of 'collecting all authority to one centre,' that centre is to be the nation, we shall remain exactly where we began, and no collection of authority at all will be made. The nation will be the authority, and the authority will be the nation. The centre will be the circle, and the circle the centre. When a number of men, women, and children, are simply congregated together, there is no political authority among them; nor any natural authority, but that of parents over their children."
Either this centralization is an illusion, and authority reposes nowhere; or it is a fact, and therefore a tyranny by those men who in actually constitute the centre. This dilemna, the conundrum of "plebiscitary democracies" in our age, Adams proceeds to examine in the light of history; for, with Burke, he looked upon history as the source of all enlightened expediency.
As Gilbert Chinard remarks, the Defence is a lawyer's brief, rather than a philosophical treatise. But what a brief! Adams is intent upon proving that only a balance of powers-- executive, senate, house of representatives, use what equivalent terms you will-- makes a free government possible. First, he examines modern democratic republics-- San Marino, Biscay, seven separate cantons of Switzerland, and the United Provinces of the Low Countries; then he turns to aristocratic republics-- nine Swiss examples, and Lucca, Genoa, Venice, and again the United Provinces. Next come three examples of regal republics, England, Poland, and Neuchatel; after that the "Opinions of Philosophers," Swift, Franklin, and Price; presently "Writers on Government," Machiavelli, Sidney, Montesquieu, and Harrington; which lead to "Opinions of Historians," Polybius (Adams' favorite among the ancients), Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plato, Locke, Milton and Hume. The seventh chapter is an analysis of twelve ancient democratic republics; the eigth, of three ancient aristocratic republics; and the ninth, of three ancient monarchial republics. It is not necessary to tabulate the contents of the second and third volumes of the Defence to be convinced of Adams' erudition. Here is a thirst for information not unworthy of comparison with Aristotle's and Bacon's. And he summarizes all this mass of evidence with a paragraph:
By the authorities and examples already recited, you will be convinced that three branches of power have an unalterable foundation in nature; that they exist in every society natural and artificial; and that if all of them are not acknowledged in any constitution of government, it would be found to be imperfect, unstable, and soon enslaved; that the legislative and executive authorities are naturally distinct; and that liberty and the laws depend entirely on a separation of them in the frame of government; that the legislative power is naturally and necessarily sovereign and supreme over the executive; and, therefore, that the latter must be made an essential branch of the former, even with a negative, or it will not be able to defend itself, but will be soon invaded, undermined, attacked, or in some way or other totally ruined and annihilated by the former.Without balance in government, there can be no true law; and without law, no liberty. [...]
In the practical art of acheiving political balance, Adams had experience; he had dominated the convention that framed the first free constitution for Massachusettes, and his early writings had influenced constitution writers in other states. He stood for a strong executive, with a veto upon the other two branches of the legislature (for the chief magistrate, although incorporated in the sovereignity of the legislature, exercises a separate authority); a senate, or upper chamber, substantially representative of wealth and position; a house or representatives, or lower chamber, substantially based upon population. And this division is not made primarily for the protection of the rich, well-born, and able against the mass of the people, but rather to protect the multitude against the ambition of aristocracy, natural or artificial. In Massachusettes, the senatorial seats were allotted to districts in proportion to the direct taxes paid into the state treasury from each area; other methods, too, might serve to distinguish the constituencies electing the members of the upper house from those electing the lower. "The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire and influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives. The most illustrious of them must, therefore, be separated from the mass, and placed by themselves in a senate; this is, to all honest and useful intents, an ostracism... the Senate becomes the great object of ambition; and the richest and most sagacious wish to merit an advancement to it by services to the public in the house."
The executive officer should be representative of the people in general, a man of august and independent character, viewing impartially the clams of the other two branches of the government. Parrington objects that Adams provides no means for selecting an executive who would truly represent the mass of people, and not the aristocratic element which tends to dominate all societies. And yet has not the American national presidency developed into very nearly the institution which Adams describes, so far as things terrestrial can approach their idea?
Thus power is distributed justly among the chief interests in society; the inedradicable natural aristocracy, to the analysis of which Adams devoted so large a part of his political writings, is recognized and to some extent moulded into a separate body by the institution of a senate; the passion of the moment and the tyranny of the omnipotent legislative organ are checked by constitutional devices. Years before, Adams had inveighed against the defects of a single assembly-- it was liable to all the frailties of an individual, it was avaricious, it was ambitious of perpetual power, it was unfit to exercise executive authority, it was too little skilled in law to exercise judicial power, and it tended to adjudge all disputes in its own favor. These evils Turgot's proposal would release upon an unlucky nation; balance alone can keep the lip upon them.
Democracy is feared by Adams no more than he dreads any other unmixed form of government: "I cannot say that democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, than any of the others. Its atrocities have been more transient; those of the others have been more permanent...Democracy must be an essential, an integral part of the sovereignity, and have a control over the whole government, or moral liberty cannot exist, or any other liberty. I have been always grieved at the gross abuse of this respectable word." But neither can moral liberties endure if democracy is unchecked by other social interests; for that matter, pure democracy destroys itself, for want of wisdom and moderation, and ends in despotism. "Where people have a voice, and there is no balance, there will be everlasting fluctuations, revolutions, and horrors, until a standing army, with a general at its head, commands the peace, or the necessity of an equillibrium is made appear to all, and is adopted by all." This far-sighted admonition was written three years before Burke stirred himself to warn France and civilization (as Laski very justly comments) of the "military dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw."
Balderdash. The government steals FAR more of our wealth than ever, playing Robin Hood to the "underclass". Our rights not to have our land stolen under "eminent domain" have shrunken drastically. Our rights to use our property as we see fit has vanished under "zoning laws", and "environmental regulations, and more. Our rights to own firearms are disappearing at a rapid pace. The only rights women have won are the right to vote and to abort. Overall, blacks ARE better off, that I'll grant you. If Washington, Jefferson, (and Adams) were alive today, the Second American Revolution would already have started.
And those things happened because the Federalists were wrong, and the Anti-Federalists were right. The central government WAS too powerful, and the mechanisms of restraint WERE too weak. Re-read the Anti-Federalist writings---in light of today's events, they are frighteningly prophetic--especially the sections on the excessive power of the courts.
Although the Federalists ceased to exist AS A POLITICAL PARTY, their political heritage lived on in the structure of the Constitution (as did the heritage of the Anti-Federalists in the Bill of Rights). Time has proven that the restrictions added by the Bill of Rights were insufficient to overcome the deficiencies embedded in the Constitution. Would that more of that structure had been influenced by the Anti-Federalists, rather than just the BoR.
You'll have to elaborate that point, as I don't get it. There ARE no "self-supporting states" although some were/are wealthier than others at various times. The South was originally wealthier than the North (which is why they objected so strongly to tariffs). Those relative positions switched after the Civil War, and the switching continues today as economic forces cause the movement of wealth from region to region.
Those things passed because the nation succumbed to the temptations of direct democracy and of marxist levelling.
E.g., Ayn Rand's insipid atheistic objectivism pap, and modern atheistic libertarianism that believes that a people who reject God and the moderating influences of traditional virtue-instilling institutions including church and family can remain free, prosperous, and secure.
But Edmund Burke described well the deadly consequences of such morality-negating hedonism and populism when he critiqued the sorry state of France post-revolution.
Libertarians--particularly atheist libertarians--are drunk on the same rotgut populist, knee-jerk anti-government wine that the Jacobins brewed up in 1793. This drunkness led to the Reign of Terror which ultimately created the necessary conditions for Napoleon to wrest absolute despostic control of France.
What was it Santayana said about those who fail to learn from history?
Well, DUDE, the restraints built into the Constitution WERE NOT ENOUGH to prevent that, now were they? That simple fact speaks for itself.
Ah, the light dawns--a South-hater. I didn't mention ONE SYLLABLE about slavery--you pulled THAT out of your own anus (after removing your head, I guess). You can stick it back there, now (your head, that is).
But that has absolutely nothing to do with the arguments between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists (except for the fact that the Federalists thought that the amendment process might allow 2/3 of the states acting together to subvert the Constitution. In other words, the Federalists wanted to make it tougher, not easier, to alter the Constitution).
And who was it that proposed for there to be provisions for new Constitutional conventions to be called? Elbridge Gerry, of the Democratic-Republican party, not the Federalists.
If the provisions for modifying the Constitution were too lenient, blame the anti-Federalists, not the Federalists.
Personally, I do not think that the amendment process is too lenient. I think that when the 16th and 17th amendment were passed, the problem was that effective counter-argument against them were not made. The system didn't fail the country, the country failed the system.
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