Dennis Hollingsworth

All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace

In the summer of our election year, I thought it would be good to brush up on constitutional history, Here are four pages from David McCulloough's John Adams, p.374:

He felt an urgency like that of 1776. Great events were taking place at home. Support for a stronger central government was gaining ground- and largely in reaction to Shays Rebellion, as Adams had foreseen. A constitutional convention was in the offing, and as he had impelled in 1776, to write his Thoughts on Government so Adams plunged ahead now, books piled about him, his pen scratching until all hours. "He is so much swallowed up in the pursuit of his subject that you must not wonder if you do not receive a line from him," Abigale explained to john Quincy. But having read what he was writing, she worried. "I tell him they will think in America that he is setting up a king."

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By early January, 1787, Adams had rushed the first installment of his effort to a London printer. Titled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, it was, in finished production, more a pamphlet than a book, in octavo form, and included on the title page a line from Pope: "All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace." Copies were sent off at once to the United States and to Jefferson in Paris.

Adams conceded that the writing suffered from too great haste. He called it a "strange book", which in many ways it was, much of it a hodge-podge overloaded with historical references and extended borrowings from other writers and usually without benefit of quotation marks. Yet in all he achieved something quite out of the ordinary, thoughtful, high-minded, and timely. To a considerable extent the book was an expanded, erudite rendition of the case for checks and balances in government that he had championed in his Thoughts on Government, and later put in to operation in his draft of the Massachusetts constitution. the people of America now had "the best opportunity and the greatness trust in their hands" that Providence ever ordained to so small a number since Adam and Eve. There must be three parts to government- executive, legislative, and judicial- and to achieve balance it was essential that it be a strong executive, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary. On the role of the executive, Adams was emphatic:

If there is one central truth to be collected from the history of all ages, it is this: that the people's rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserced without a strong executive, or, in other words, without separating the executive from the legislative power. If the executive power, or any considerable part of it, is left in the hands of an aristocratical or democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature as necessarily as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic poisons the human body; and when the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.

Nonetheless, the legislative power was "naturally and necessarily sovereign and supreme" over the executive.

In all history, he declared, there was no greater statesman and philosopher than Cicero, whose authority should ever carry great weight, and Cicero's decided opinion in favor of the three branches of government was founded on a reason that was timeless, unchangeable. Were Cicero to return to earth, he would see that the English nation had brought "the great idea" nearly to perfection. The English constitution, Adams declared- and knowing he would be taken to task for it- was the ideal. Indeed, "both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations," it was the most stupendous fabric of human invention" in all history. Americans should be applauded for imitating it as far as had been done, but also, he stressed, for making certain improvements i nthe original, especially in rejecting all hereditary positions.

A hereditary monarchy could be a republic, Adams held, as England demonstrated, and hereditary aristocracies could be usefully employed in balanced governments, as in the House of Lords. But Adams adamantly opposed hereditary moonarchy and hereditary aristocracy in America, as well as all hereditary titles, honors, or distinctions of any kind- it was why he, like Jefferson and Franklin, strongly opposed the Society of the Cincinnati, the association restricted to Continental Army officers, which had a hereditary clause i its rules whereby membership was passed on to eldest sons.

As he explained to Jefferson, much of what he wrote was in response to the dangers of radical French thought. Specifically he had written in defence (hence the title) against the theories of the philosophe Turgot, who espoused perfect democracy and a single legislature, or as he wrote, "collecting all authority into one center, that of the nation." To Adams this was patent nonsense. A simple, perfect democracy had never yet existed. The whole people were incapable of deciding much of anything, even on the small scale of a village. He had enough experience with town meetings at home to know that in order for anything to be done certain powers and responsibilities had to be delegated to a moderator, a town clerk, a constable, and, at times, to special committees.

Reliance on a single legislature was a certain road to disaster, for the same reason reliance on a single executive- king, potentate, president- was bound to bring ruin and despotism. As the planets were held in their orbits by centripital and centrifugal forces, "instead of rushing to the sun or flying off in tangents" among the stars, there must, in a just and enduring government, be a balance of forces. Balance, counterpoise, and equilibrium were ideals that he turned to repeatedly. if all power were to be vested in a single legislature, "What was there to restrain it from making tyrannical laws, in order to execute them in a tyrannical manner?"

At home every state but Pennsylvania and Georgia had a bicameral legislature, and because of the obvious shortcomings of the one-house Congress under the Articles of Confederation, agreement on the need for a bicameral Congress was widespread. So to a considerable degree Adams was preaching what had become accepted doctrine at home.

Drawing on history and literature, some fifty books altogether, he examined what he called the modern democratic republics (the little Italian commonwealth of San Marino, Biscay in the Basque region of Spain, the Swiss cantons), modern monarchal and regal republics (England, Poland); as well as the ancient democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical republics including Carthage, Athens, Sparta, and Rome. There were frequent citations in Latin, Greek, and French, extended use of Swift, Franklin, dr. Price, Machiavelli, Guiccaiardini's Historia d'Italia, Montesquieu, Plato, Milton, and Hume, in addition to scattered mentions of Aristotle, Thucydides, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, adn Rousseau, as well as joseph Priestly, whom Adams had lately come to know in London.

But for all this it remained at heart a layer's brief for what he had said in his Thoughts on Government, and what he had helped establish in practice in the Massachusetts constitution. Where it departed most notably from what he had written before was in its pronouncements on human nature.

To Adams nothing had changed about human nature since the time of the ancients. Inequities within society were inevitable, no matter the political order. Human beings were capable of great good, but also great evil. thus it had always been and thus it would ever be. he quoted Rousseau's description o f"that hideous sight, the human heart," and recounted that even Dr. Priestly had said that such were the weaknesses and folly of men, "their love of domination, selfishness, and depravity," that none could be elevated above others without risk of danger.

How he wished it were not so, Adams wrote. Thucydides had said the source of all evils was "a thirst of power, from rapacious and ambitious passions," and Adams agreed. "Religions, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest and power."

As to the ideal of a nation of equals, such was impossible. "Was there, or will there ever be a nation whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer in all mankind must be in the negative."

Even in America where there was "a moral and political equality of rights and duties," there were nonetheless inequalities of wealth, education, family position, and such differences were true of all people in all times. There was inevitably a "natural aristocracy among mankind," those people of virtue and ability who were "the brightest ornaments and the glory" of a nation, "and may always be made the greatest blessings of society, if it be judiciously managed in the constitution." These were the people who had the capacity to acquire great wealth and make use of political power, and fo rall they contributed to society, unless they could thus become the most dangerous element in society, unless they and their interests were consigned to one branch of the legislature, teh Senate, and given no executive power. Above all, the executive magistrate must have sufficient power to defend himself, and thus the people, from all the "enterprises" of the natural aristocracy.

Adams had believed in a "government of laws and not of men," as he had written in his Thoughts on Government and in the Massachusetts constitution but, as he stressed now in conclusion, "The executive power is properly the government; the laws are a dead letter until an administration begins to carry them into execution.

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*Note for the first paragraph above, refer to page 436, which illustrates how our two party system was born, incipient and integral to the creation story of the USA:

Seeing themselves as representing the true spirit of republican ideals, Jefferson, Madison, Freneau, and others allied with them had begun calling themselves Republicans, thus implying that the Federalists were not, but rather monarchists, or monocrats, as Jefferson preferred to say. And while there was as yet some question whether it was Jefferson or Madison who led the Republicans, there was no doubt about who led the Federalists. It was Hamilton, who was more than a match for anyone.

So the question of the level of executive power was the dividing line between them, diffused/suffused or concentrated/restrained. One beheld an ideal of democracy (mankind is inherently good) and the other the horror of mob rule (original sin?). I would say that this template has roughly the same coordinates as we have today, except that the names have changed hands at least once along the way.

Posted by Dennis at September 11, 2008 4:18 AM