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Subject Area: Political Theory
Topic: The American Revolution and Constitution

TO JOHN JEBB. - John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 9 (Letters and State Papers 1799-1811) [1854]

Edition used:

The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 9.

Part of: The Works of John Adams, 10 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


TO JOHN JEBB.

London, 10 September, 1785.

It is a wise maxim that every free man ought to have some profession, calling, trade, or farm, whereby he may honestly subsist; but it by no means follows as a consequence that there can be no necessity for, nor use in establishing offices of profit, if we mean by these, offices with moderate, decent, and stated salaries, sufficient for the comfortable support of the officers and their families. Offices in general ought to yield as honest a subsistence, and as clear an independence as professions, callings, trades, or farms. If by offices of profit we mean offices of excessive profit, it is not only true that there can be no necessity for them nor use in establishing them, but it is clear they ought never to exist. The dependence and servility unbecoming freemen in the possessors and expectants, the faction, contention, corruption, and disorder amongst the people, do not arise from the honest profit, but from the excess, and they oftener arise from ambition than avarice. An office without profits, without salary, fees, perquisites, or any kind of emolument, is sought for with servility, faction, and corruption, from ambition, as often as an office of profit is sought from avarice.

And this is the way in which corruption is constantly introduced into society. It constantly begins with the people, in their elections. Indeed, the first step of corruption is this dishonest disposition in the people, an unwillingness to pay their representatives. The moment they require of a candidate that he serve them gratis, they establish an aristocracy by excluding from a possibility of serving them, all who are poor and unambitious, and by confining their suffrages to a few rich men. When this point is once gained of the people, which is easily gained, because their own avarice pleads for it, tyranny has made a gigantic stride. I appeal to your knowledge of England, whether servility, faction, contention, and corruption appear anywhere in so gross forms as in the election of members of parliament, whose offices are very expensive and have no profits. Is not the legislative at this hour more corrupt than the executive? Are there not more servility, faction, contention, and corruption in the offices in the election of the people than in disposing of those in the gift of the crown? Are there not as many in proportion who apply for these elections as for offices in the army, navy, church, or revenue? The number of persons who apply for an office, then, is no proof of an increase of its fees or profits. The man who offers to a city or borough to serve them for nothing, offers a bribe to every elector, and the answer should be, “Sir, you affront me. I want a service which is worth something. I am able and willing to pay for it. I will not lay myself under any obligation to you by accepting your gift. I will owe you no gratitude any further than you serve me faithfully. The obligation and gratitude shall be from you to me, and if you do not do your duty to me, I will be perfectly free to call you to an account, and to punish you; and if you will not accept of pay for your service, you shall not serve me.”

There are in history examples of characters wholly disinterested, who have displayed the sublimest talents, the greatest virtues, at the same time that they have made long and severe sacrifices to their country, of their time, their estates, their labor, healths, and even their lives, and they are deservedly admired and revered, by all virtuous men. But how few have they been! One in two or three ages; certainly not enough to watch over the rights of mankind, for these have been lost in almost all ages and nations. Societies should not depend upon a succession of such men for the preservation of their liberties. The people ruin their own cause, by exacting such sacrifices in their service. Men see nothing but misery to themselves and ruin to their families, attached to the honest service of the people, and the examples of Aristides, Fabricius, and Cincinnatus, have in all ages terrified thousands of able and worthy men from engaging in a service so hopeless and uncomfortable. Knaves and hypocrites see through the whole system at once. “I will take the people their own way,” says one of these, “I will serve them without pay. I will give them money. I will make them believe that I am perfectly disinterested, until I gain their confidence and excite their enthusiasm. Then I will carry that confidence and enthusiasm to market, and will sell it for more than all I give them, and all their pay would have amounted to. Si populus vult decipi, decipiatur. It should be a fundamental maxim with the people never to receive any services gratis, nor to suffer any faithful service to go unrewarded, nor any unfaithful services unpunished. Their rewards should be temperate. Instead of this, how stingy are they at first, and how wild at last! Stingy, until the man has served them long enough to gain their confidence, mad and frantic with generosity, afterwards. Their gratitude, when once their enthusiasm is excited, knows no bounds; it scatters their favors all around the man. His family, his father, brother, son, all his relations, all his particular friends, must be idolized. Wealth and power without measure or end must be conferred upon them, without considering whether they be wise men or fools, honest men or knaves.

The social science will never be much improved, until the people unanimously know and consider themselves as the fountain of power, and until they shall know how to manage it wisely and honestly. Reformation must begin with the body of the people, which can be done only, to effect, in their educations. The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves. They must be taught to reverence themselves, instead of adoring their servants, their generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen. Instead of admiring so extravagantly a prince of Orange, we should admire the Batavian nation, which produced him. Instead of adoring a Washington, mankind should applaud the nation which educated him. If Thebes owes its liberty and glory to Epaminondas, she will lose both when he dies, and it would have been as well if she had never enjoyed a taste of either. But if the knowledge, the principles, the virtues, and the capacities of the Theban nation produced an Epaminondas, her liberties and glory will remain when he is no more. And if an analogous system of education is established and enjoyed by the whole nation, it will produce a succession of Epaminondases. The human mind naturally exerts itself to form its character, according to the ideas of those about it. When children and youth hear their parents and neighbors, and all about them, applauding the love of country, of labor, of liberty, and all the virtues, habits, and faculties, which constitute a good citizen, that is, a patriot and a hero, those children endeavor to acquire those qualities, and a sensible and virtuous people will never fail to form multitudes of patriots and heroes. I glory in the character of a Washington, because I know him to be only an exemplification of the American character. I know that the general character of the natives of the United States is the same with his, and that the prevalence of such sentiments and principles produced his character and preserved it, and I know there are thousands of others who have in them all the essential qualities, moral and intellectual, which compose it. If his character stood alone, I should value it very little,—I should wish it had never existed; because, although it might have wrought a great event, yet that event would be no blessing. In the days of Pompey, Washington would have been a Cæsar; his officers and partisans would have stimulated him to it; he could not have had their confidence without it; in the time of Charles, a Cromwell; in the days of Philip the second, a prince of Orange, and would have wished to be Count of Holland. But in America he could have no other ambition than that of retiring. In wiser and more virtuous times he would not have had that, for that is an ambition. He would still be content to be Governor of Virginia, President of Congress, a member of a Senate, or a House of Representatives. It was a general sentiment in America that Washington must retire. Why? What is implied in this necessity? If he could not afford to serve the public longer without pay, let him be paid. Would it lessen his reputation? Why should it? If the people were perfectly judicious, instead of lessening, it would raise it. But if it did not, surely the late revolution was not undertaken to raise one great reputation to make a sublime page in history, but for the good of the people. Does not this idea of the necessity of his retiring, imply an opinion of danger to the public, from his continuing in public, a jealousy that he might become ambitious? and does it not imply something still more humiliating, a jealousy in the people of one another, a jealousy of one part of the people, that another part had grown too fond of him, and acquired habitually too much confidence in him, and that there would be danger of setting him up for a king? Undoubtedly it does, and undoubtedly there were such suspicions, and grounds for them too. Now, I ask, what occasioned this dangerous enthusiasm for him? I answer, that, great as his talents and virtues are, they did not altogether contribute so much to it as his serving without pay, which never fails to turn the heads of the multitude. His ten thousand officers under him, and all his other admirers, might have sounded his fame as much as they would, and they might have justly sounded it very high, and it would not all have produced such ecstasies among the people as this single circumstance. Now, I say, this is all wrong. There should have been no such distinction made between him and the other generals. He should have been paid, as well as they, and the people should have too high a sense of their own dignity ever to suffer any man to serve them for nothing. The higher and more important the office, the more rigorously should they insist upon acknowledging its appointment by them and its dependence upon them. But then they must be sensible of their own enthusiasm, and constantly upon their guard against it. They should consider that, although history presents us perhaps with one example in five hundred years of one disinterested character, it shows us two thousand instances every year of the semblance of disinterestedness, counterfeited for the most selfish purposes of cheating them more effectually. And the glory of an Aristides and half a dozen others, with the transient flashes of liberty they preserved in the world, is a miserable compensation to mankind for the long, dreary ages of gloomy despotism, which have passed almost over the whole earth by means of disinterested patriots becoming artful knaves, or rather by the people themselves not suffering their benefactors to persevere in that disinterestedness to the end, which they exact of them at first; for I think that it has been the people themselves who have always created their own despots.

You erased something you had written about the present times. I wish you would restore it. This correspondence must be confidential. But the late Lord Chatham is a striking example. He preserved the character of disinterestedness but imperfectly; yet it was somewhat of this kind that elevated him so high in the affections of the people, and you now see the consequences. The people think it a duty to God to make up in their devotion to his son, what they think they were wanting in gratitude to him. What but a whirlwind could have done what we have seen?

Government must become something more intelligible, rational, and steady.

Pardon all this from your friend.