Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
different occupations, there is another, of a nature allied to
it, and of a similar tendency. This is the employment of persons
who would otherwise be idle, and in many cases, a burthen on the
community, either from bias of temper, habit, infirmity of body,
or some other cause, indisposing or disqualifying them for the
toils of the country. It is worthy of particular remark, that,
in general, women and children are rendered more useful, and the
latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments, than
they would otherwise be. Of the number of persons employed in
the cotton manufactories of Great Britain, it is computed that
four-sevenths, nearly, are women and children; of whom the greatest
proportion are children, and many of them of a tender age.[320]
If the material power and splendor of the state be the great end of
statesmanship--as Hamilton believed--no just complaint can be lodged
against such a policy; but if the well-being of the individual citizen
be the chief end--as Jefferson maintained--a very different judgment
must be returned.
Although the fame of Hamilton has been most closely associated with
the principle of constitutional centralization, his truer significance
is to be found in his relation to the early developments of our modern
capitalistic order. In his understanding of credit finance and the
factory economy, he grasped the meaning of the economic revolution
which was to transform America from an agrarian to an industrial
country; and in urging the government to further such development, he
blazed the path that America has since followed. “A very great man,”
Woodrow Wilson has called him, “but not a great American.” In the
larger historical meaning of the term, in its democratic implications,
that judgment is true; but in the light of our industrial history,
with its corporate development and governmental subsidies, it does not
seem so true. As the creative organizer of a political state answering
the needs of a capitalistic order--a state destined to grow stronger
as imperialistic ambitions mount--he seems the most modern and the
most American of our eighteenth-century leaders, one to whom our
industrialism owes a very great debt, but from whom our democratic
liberalism has received nothing.
II • John Adams • Realist
Midway between Hamilton and Jefferson stands John Adams, the most
painstaking student of government and the most widely read in political
history, of his generation of Americans. The noble art of government
was a lifelong passion with him--the sublimest subject, in his opinion,
which a free citizen could study. Solid, pragmatic, unimaginative, he
was an admirable representative of the later eighteenth century with
its vigorous understanding, its distrust of idealisms, its contempt for
social theory. He was the political counterpart of Dr. Johnson. To a
generation sniveling over the sorrows of life and seeking panaceas in
Rousseau sentimentalisms, the English Tory proffered the consolation of
the realist. Things are bad enough, heaven knows; poverty, injustice,
disease, death, are evils which no optimism can shut its eyes to. But
what can be done? The malady of human nature is a disease beyond the
reach of romantic plasters. No quack remedies will cure ills that
lie too deep for laws or kings--they only aggravate the trouble.
Be sensible therefore. Endure like men what cannot be cured. Stop
sniveling and make the best of things as they are.
The analogy between these two vigorous exponents of common sense is
too obvious to miss. For years the chief business of John Adams was
to bring home to Americans the lesson in realism which Samuel Johnson
was urging upon his countrymen. The mischief of romantic idealisms was
spreading widely in America, disseminated by propagandists like Tom
Paine and theorists like Jefferson; there was high need that the people
be brought back to sober reality. This duty he took upon himself. He
was an uncompromising realist who refused to be duped by fine dreams or
humanitarian panaceas; he was much given to throwing cold water on the
hope of social regeneration through political agencies. And the reward
which he gained for his voluntary labors was a personal unpopularity
beyond that of any other statesman of the time. He was charged
with apostasy from his earlier democratic faith, and the charge had
sufficient foundation, unfortunately, to make it credible if one wished
to believe it.
During the revolutionary struggle he had been a member of the left
wing; during the early struggles under the Constitution he was a member
of the right wing. The young man had been a stalwart defender of human
rights, the old man was a stalwart defender of property rights; and
this shift of position was fatal to his reputation with the rising
democratic party. The French Revolution marked the critical turning
point in his intellectual development. As a politician he was well-nigh
ruined by it; but as a political thinker he owed it much. Before that
vast upheaval came to challenge his somewhat conventional mind, he
was a hard-working lawyer-politician, with a liking for legalistic
constitutional theory; but as the Revolution went forward, he was
forced into uncompromising reaction. While ardent young Americans
were becoming pro-French, he became pro-British; while they were
accepting the new leveling principles, he searched history to prove
how inevitable are social distinctions and economic classes; while
they looked hopefully forward to a democratic future, he gathered his
materials for an interpretation of political forces that revealed
aristocracy as the dominant factor in every society. Both Adams and his
critics were products of the French upheaval, but facing in different
directions; naturally, the antagonism between them became sharp and
bitter.
The severest critic cannot deny to John Adams excellent qualities
of mind and heart. A sound lawyer, a capable statesman, a vigorous
thinker and courageous debater, he fought his way from obscurity
to high position and many honors, and in every responsibility he
acquitted himself in a fashion altogether worthy of the notable
Adams posterity. A stubborn intellectual independence and a vigorous
assertiveness were his distinguishing characteristics. He revealed
to the full the Adams trait of going its own way and coming to its
own conclusions. He was never the victim of mob psychology, and he
was never careful of occasion or circumstance in speaking out his
convictions. America has had too few independent minds, and much of
Adams’s unpopularity was the result of his refusal to hunt with the
pack. Unfortunately his admirable qualities were offset by a blundering
tactlessness and a colossal vanity that brought many troubles upon
his head. He loved to be in the public eye and he studied the little
arts of self-advertising. In his youthful diary he set down these
characteristic words: “Reputation ought to be a perpetual subject of
my thoughts, and aim of my behavior. How shall I spread an opinion of
myself as a lawyer of distinguished genius, learning, and virtue?”
Self-confident, domineering, and jealously suspicious--always on the
lookout lest some honor due him should fall to another--he struggled
through a career strewn with animosities and heartburnings that a
nicer tact and a more generous nature would have avoided. He was his
own worst enemy. He did not spare himself in public service, but he
demanded strict payment and was inclined to haggle over the terms; in
consequence his later days were embittered and his fame was less than
he deserved.
Our present concern, however, is with the political scientist and not
with the politician; with the theories of government that occupied so
much of his thought, rather than with the policies of the statesman.
He wrote voluminously, heavily, with no grace of style or savor of
wit, and the long row of his collected writings may well appall the
reader who proposes to make his acquaintance. Ponderous treatises are
supplemented by lesser works and flanked by innumerable letters; his
industry was prodigious and no one will wonder at his exclamation, “My
hand is impatient of the pen and longs to throw it down.” His important
work divides broadly into two main divisions: his contribution to the
colonial debate with England, and his elaborate system of government
formulated during the years of French revolutionary debate. A brief
consideration will suffice for the first, but the second requires more
careful examination.
In his contributions to the colonial debate Adams concerned himself
mainly with questions of constitutional law. He placed little reliance
on the appeal to natural rights, and showed scant respect for “popular
talk and those democratical principles which have done so much mischief
in this country.”[321] The American cause, he believed, should be based
on constitutional principles, but those principles required restatement
in the light of existing fact. They must be rescued from the narrow
interpretation of little Englanders and adapted to meet the pressing
needs of imperial federation. The English people were not all residents
of the British Isles, and a constitutional practice suited to compact
groups in a common environment, was ill adapted to the needs of widely
sundered bodies of British subjects. Into this difficult and momentous
business of imperial federation, Adams plunged earnestly in an endeavor
to chart the unexplored field. That the problem was the gravest then
confronting Englishmen is abundantly evident today; that it received
grossly inadequate consideration on both sides of the Atlantic is
equally clear. In this field John Adams was a pioneer and his work
possesses still some historical interest. This fact, too frequently
overlooked, has been emphasized by a recent student, who has summarized
the final results of Adams’s thinking in the following theses: that the
empire was an association of equals, each with independent legislative
powers; that the British constitution was the fundamental law of the
empire, defining the relationship of the constituent parts; and that it
was the function of the judiciary to disallow a legislative act of any
of the several legislatures which did not comport with the fundamental
law, or which attempted to impose the will of one of the partners in
violation of the fundamental understanding and its guarantee.[322]
Such, in compressed form, was Adams’s elaboration and justification
of the dogma of Otis, that an act against the constitution was void.
In its relation to current English constitutional practice it was
at once revolutionary and reactionary. It implied a double attack
upon parliamentary sovereignty, first in limiting its powers by a
super-parliamentary constitution, and then in subjecting its acts to
judicial review. The final result would be the transfer of sovereignty
from the legislature to the judiciary. The idea had been toyed with
by English lawyers, but never seriously considered; it was alien to
the whole theory and history of parliamentary development. English
landed gentlemen have never been minded to grant the veto power to
the judiciary, but have persistently retained sovereignty in the
legislature. Nevertheless in such early speculation is found the germ
of our later practice, as it finally developed through the decisions of
Chief Justice Marshall.
In the works of his later period, such as _A Defence of the
Constitution of Government of the United States of America_ and
_Discourses on Davila_, Adams emerged from the narrow field of
constitutional law and elaborated a theory of government based on wide
reading and long observation. It was by way of reply to the French
thinkers, and it contributed in large measure to the partisan passions