Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
but prelude to the rise of another aristocracy to repeat the unhappy
process.
The passions and desires of the majority of the representatives
being in their nature insatiable and unlimited by any thing within
their own breasts, and having nothing to control them without, will
crave more and more indulgence, and, as they have the power, they
will have the gratification.[331]
If you give more than a share in the sovereignty to the democrats,
that is, if you give them the command or preponderance in the
sovereignty, that is, the legislature, they will vote all property
out of the hands of you aristocrats, and if they let you escape
with your lives, it will be more humanity, consideration, and
generosity than any triumphant democracy ever displayed since the
creation. And what will follow? The aristocracy among the democrats
will take your places, and treat their fellows as severely and
sternly as you have treated them.[332]
The end of every democratic experiment, Adams pointed out, has been the
man on horseback. So inevitably does democracy culminate in despotism,
that “in reality, the word democracy signifies nothing more nor less
than a nation of people without any government at all, and before any
constitution is instituted.”[333] “Democracy never has been and never
can be so desirable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts,
is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It
soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy
that did not commit suicide.” “The proposition that the people are
the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the
worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge,
act, think, or will, as a political body. Individuals have conquered
themselves; nations and large bodies never.”[334]
Having thus examined the major doctrines of the French democratic
school, namely, that men are good by nature, that the social end
is liberty, equality, fraternity, and that social well-being will
result from an appeal to reason, Adams had cleared the problem of
what he regarded as misconceptions, and was ready to lay out a
system of government which should demonstrate his skill in political
architecture. The determining factor in laying down the main lines was
sufficiently clear. Since property lies at the root of the problem
of government, the business of devising a just and stable system of
government resolves itself into the question, What shall be done about
property? As an orthodox Whig Adams found part of his answer ready
to hand. With Locke he believed that property rights are sacred, and
that it is a chief business of government to protect private property
against unjust expropriation. The security of property may be taken as
the measure of the stability of government. “The moment the idea is
admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of
God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect
it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”[335] “The very name of a republic
implies, that the property of the people should be represented in
the legislature, and decide the rule of justice,” he argued, quoting
Cicero.[336] Moreover, the futility of any other arrangement was
axiomatic in his philosophy. If property is not granted representation,
it will usurp it; if attacked, it will know how to defend itself; and
the end will be the setting up of an oligarchy on the ruins of the
republic. But if Adams agreed with Hamilton that the state should
deal tenderly with the rights and interests of property, he refused
to go with the latter in his sole concern for the wealthy. Greater
property interests must be held in due balance with the smaller, for
if unchecked the strong will drive on to ruthless exploitation of the
weak, and society will be endangered from the top as in a democracy it
is endangered from the bottom. It was this desire for a mean between
oligarchy or monarchy on the one hand, and democracy on the other, that
determined his choice of a republican form of government.
The difficult problem of property-power in the state, Adams was
convinced, could be solved justly and permanently only by a judicious
system of balanced interests. Subjected, as every government must be,
to a persistent stress of rival interests, it must be constructed with
calculated nicety, or the structure would fall of its own weight;
and the sole principle, he believed, is that of the Gothic arch--the
principle of thrust and counter-thrust. Provide in such manner that the
selfishness of one group in society shall be neutralized by the counter
selfishness of other groups, let the buttress support the arch at its
weakest point, and upon such an equilibrium of counterforces great
vaults and noble towers may be erected. It is the apotheosis of the
system of checks and balances.
It is agreed that “the end of all government is the good and ease
of the people, in a secure enjoyment of their rights, without
oppression”; but it must be remembered, that the rich are _people_
as well as the poor; that they have rights as well as others; that
they have as clear and as sacred a right to their large property
as others have to theirs which is smaller; that oppression to them
is as possible and as wicked as to others. The rich, therefore,
ought to have an effectual barrier in the constitution against
being robbed, plundered, and murdered, as well as the poor; and
this can never be without an independent senate. The poor should
have a bulwark against the same dangers and oppressions; and this
can never be without a house of representatives of the people. But
neither the rich nor the poor can be defended by their respective
guardians in the constitution, without an executive power, vested
with a negative, equal to either, to hold the balance even between
them, and decide when they cannot agree.[337]
Such in brief was the master principle of that system of mixed
government which John Adams advocated so persistently in the teeth
of the popular demand for a simpler, more responsive form. It based
itself frankly upon the dogma of the class struggle; it provided each
class--as he recognized them in his simple social analysis--with a
legislative arm with which to defend itself; and it set as arbiter
between them an executive, carefully selected, who was supposed to
represent that abstract _tertium quid_, the public. The keynote is
struck in a line from Pope set on the title-page of the _Defence_--“All
Nature’s difference keeps all Nature’s peace.” That Adams greatly
admired his handiwork is beyond doubt; that he was intellectually
honest with himself is very likely true; but that there is a note of
disingenuousness, a failure to take into account his pronounced bias
towards property interest, is certain. There was ample ground for the
popular dislike of his theory. This is not the place to enter upon an
examination of the system of checks and balances, nor to insist that
any such system becomes in practice an impossibility. It is more to
the point to remark upon certain fallacies in his theory which Adams
himself must have seen if his mind had been quite free from bias.
Adams’s intelligent analysis of social forces should have saved him
from the major fallacy of the doctrine of checks and balances. In
imposing the doctrine of a separation of powers upon the doctrine of
property power, he effectively denied the validity of the latter.
Assuming for the sake of the argument that the Senate will represent
property, what reason justified the assumption that the House would
represent the small men, or that the President would speak for the
whole? If property is sovereign, as Adams maintained--“Harrington
has shown that power always follows property. This I believe to be
as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and reaction are
equal, is in mechanics”[338]--will it not rule the House equally with
the Senate? above all, will it not control so important an officer as
the President? The theory that the President represents an abstract
public is a disingenuous political fiction; in the light of Adams’s
theory of economic determinism it is a gross absurdity. Moreover, Adams
invalidated his entire system by refusing to provide the necessary
machinery by which the House could represent the small man. In denying
manhood suffrage, he eliminated the proletarian and the renter from
the political equation, and left them without political power; in his
definition the small man was the freeholder, the representative of
the middle class. The House, therefore, equally with the Senate, was
the mouthpiece of property interests; the former more likely to be
representative of land, the latter of capital.
Where did Adams get the major ideas of his political philosophy?[339]
An omnivorous reader, he gathered from many sources, and his memory was
a well-stocked storehouse of fact and theory. As a young man he was
disciple of Locke and the natural-rights school, but as he grew older
he abandoned the natural-rights theory. His interpretation of human
nature he took over from Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hume, discovering in
their psychology of self-interest and emulation--often mean but many
times admirable--a conception in harmony with the Calvinism of his
early training. He owed much to Bolingbroke, whom he read five times,
but to James Harrington, the Commonwealth intellectual, he turned with
a zest of discovery so great that he may not unjustly be called one
of Harrington’s disciples. From the _Oceana_ he drew so abundantly
that the most casual student of political theory must remark his
indebtedness. Many of the major doctrines of Adams, which by dint of
iteration have become associated with his name, were taken straight
out of Harrington: such as the doctrine of a natural aristocracy; the
economic basis of sovereignty, discovered in the close relation of
property to power; the necessity of effecting a balance between rival
interests, with the ideal state rendered static by a nice balance of
governmental machinery; the conception of government by laws and not
by men; and finally, the historical method of approach, the cautious
appeal to past experience. Since Harrington’s time many of these
ideas had been restated: the defense of property rights by Locke; the
principle of the separation of powers and the historical method by
Montesquieu; the psychology of emulation by Hume and Robert Wallace,
the latter of whom is another Adams in his thesis, “Lust of power
sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich.” But in spite
of these later reinterpretations and his own additions, John Adams
remained essentially a seventeenth-century republican, preferring with
Milton the rule of the aristocracy to that of plebeians, and hating
all Jacobin radicalisms as the spawn of a dangerous romanticism that
disregarded the plain teachings of history and the admonitions of
common sense.
Though Adams was fiercely assailed as an advocate of class government,
he was far less hostile to agrarianism than was Hamilton. He was no
believer in unchecked government by wealth. His honest realism taught
him the sophistry of Hamilton’s assumption that gentlemen of property
are equally gentlemen of principle, and that wealth voluntarily
abdicates selfish interest. He feared the aggressions of the rich as
much as the turbulence of the poor. The bulk of his property was in
land, and his sympathies were enlisted on the side of a law-abiding
agrarianism, rather than on the side of a speculative capitalism.[340]
He would put down vigorously all such leveling as was implied in
Shays’s program, and the repudiations of Rhode Island; but he would not