executive chief or king, to counterpoise the aristocracy, so that his government, adapting itself to his state, would inevitably have degenerated into an aristarchy, like England in his day.

At all events, he did not mind the oncoming of the aristocratic condition: he did not mind inequality, paying but scant attention even to the preservation of a middle class (cf. iv. 363, v. 459); he did not mind luxury; he would not waste effort in trying to prevent the intrusion of corruption, which he regarded as unavoidable. "The problem ought to be," he said, “to find a form of government best calculated to prevent the bad effects and corruption of luxury, when in the ordinary course of things, it must be expected to come in." He therefore made no provision against the rich few acquiring all the land and overbalancing the many. Agrarian laws he contemned2: he would leave the distribution of property to take its own course, and derided Jefferson's plan of dividing intestate estates as insufficient for the purpose for which it was designed (x. 103), -which is only too true3; and with other suggested

I

▪ VI., 94.—In a little skit on Parties written by Madison in 1792 there is an obvious hit at Adams. Madison concludes: "From the expediency, in politics, of making natural parties mutual checks on each other, to infer the propriety of creating artificial parties in order to form them into mutual checks, is not less absurd than it would be in ethics to say that new vices ought to be promoted, where they would counteract each other, because this use may be made of existing vices," Writings, iv., 469. (Cf. 483 on this being effected by "a mysterious operation," which he represents as advocated by an "Anti-Republican.")

2 Cf. iv., 540 (of the Gracchi). "Do you suppose Americans would make or submit to a law to limit to a small number, or to any number, the acres of land which a man might possess?" vi., 21–2.

3 But his editor and descendant thought it sufficient, iv., 359-60 n. Cf. C. Pinckney, Elliot's Debates, v., 233, 235, iv., 320-1, and Lee, ib., iii., 185; also Webster, Works, i., 35-6.

remedies he later showed impatience, such as alienation of land and inhibitions upon monopolies, sophisticating against the former that it only transfers from one to another, and against the latter that in our free country there were as many monopolies as elsewhere (vi. 507– 10). For all the evils of a highly complex and corrupt civilization he had in reserve one full and sufficient remedy in his threefold balance of an equally mixed government (96)— on the model of the English! Like one possessed of a panacea, he feared no disease.' And his cure-all, always stable, was of a nature to preserve itself. He would therefore do nothing further to guard the mixture when he once got it.

Such, be it remembered, is his frame of mind in his second period, which began in the fall of 1786. It was not so in his first period, during the stress of the Revolution, when he sided rather with the democrats, following Harrington rather closely, as we have just seen, and, as we saw before, combating "the barons of the south" who wished to introduce into our governments some of the aristocratic concoctions he is now himself prescribing. So late as February, 1786, he wrote: "It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say"-he was addressing a German count "it is impossible. If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment, and preserve our equality as long as we can" (ix. 546).

For this reason he did not agree with Jefferson, who in his Notes on Virginia had written: "The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered," Works, viii., 363.

About the same time he mentioned his having half a mind to devote the next ten years of his life to writing a book upon the subject of nobility, wishing to inquire into the practice of all nations "to see how far the division of mankind into patricians and plebeians, nobles and simples, is necessary and inevitable, and how far it is not. Nature," he added, "has not made this discrimination. Art has done it. Art may then prevent it. Would it do good or evil to prevent it? I believe good." Then in the late summer and fall of that year occurred the so-called Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts, reports of which, probably distorted, reached him in Europe. He now made no allowance for the unsettled condition of the country after a desolating civil war and during the affliction of a depreciated and fluctuating and therefore at times appreciating currency. He gave way to the belief that the American people were showing themselves no less violent than the mobile vulgus had elsewhere generally shown itself.4 What had been written by Europeans in denunciation of democracy under an ignorant and propertiless lower class, he applied to democracy in a people with a propertied and educated lower class. And now his second

I VIII., 370. For this project cf. 431. It was abandoned, 435, or rather replaced by the books extolling aristocracy as the unpreventable product of nature.

One of the demands of the insurgents, it may be noted, was the abolition of the senate, Bancroft, History of the Constitution, ii., 395.

3 This last he did notice in the summer of 1787 (when the Convention was sitting) as paramount to any "defects in their [the Americans'] constitution or confederation," viii., 447.

4 Indeed, the first germ of Adams's distrust of the people may be traced back to an incident which occurred eleven years before in the camp before Boston, when a debtor expressed satisfaction at the closing of the courts. See ii., 420.

period comes in with a rush. His new science of government, in which democracy is reduced to one third, and that occupying the third place, is fully developed in the first volume of his Defense, written in the last three months of the same year, and published early in 1787. Yet it was not till the third volume of that work, published in 1788, that his hints at monarchy and hereditary aristocracy became unmistakably plain and emphatic. The Discourses on Davila, which appeared serially in 1790, and which he says may be called the fourth volume of the Defense (x. 96), was the culmination; following which, after an interval, came a gradually louder-sounding palinode.

For the influence of Shays's rebellion, see i., 432, ix., 551, 552 (cf. 623), X., 53. Cf. Jefferson: "Mr. Adams had originally been a republican. The glare of royalty and nobility, during his mission to England, had made him believe their fascination a necessary ingredient in government; and Shays's rebellion, not sufficiently understood where he then was, seemed to prove that the absence of want and oppression was not a sufficient guarantee of order," Works, ix., 97.

IV. ATTITUDE TOWARD THE AMERICAN

GOVERNMENTS

CHAPTER XVII

WE

CRITICISM OF THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION

E must now turn to this aspect of Adams's second period-his attitude toward the governments of the several American States and the government of the United States. His Defense of the Constitutions was written entirely with a view to defending the constitutional systems inaugurated in the States, particularly his own constitution of Massachusetts and those which resembled it,' in the matter of the two divisions, of the whole government into three departments, and of the legislative department into three branches (viii. 458, ix. 572-3), against the unicameral and "simple democracy" system embodied in the constitution of Pennsylvania, falsely (he said) ascribed to Franklin, but really due to Matlack, Cannon, Young, and Paine,2 and in

I VI., 463, 465, 486, ix., 623-4, X., 413.

2

II., 507-8, iii., 220, ix., 622-3. But he ascribed the French single assembly to Franklin's authority, vi., 394 n. As for the Pennsylvania single assembly, that was really due to Penn, who put it (with an executive council) in his last constitutions, in 1696 and 1701; and, being approved, it was continued in the State constitution of 1776. This, according to Graydon, “was understood to have been principally the work of Mr. George Bryan, in conjunction with a Mr. Cannon, a school

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