1790
A BALANCED GOVERNMENT
From "Discourses on Davila,"
by John Adams
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
A Balanced Government
AMIDST all their exultations, Americans and Frenchmen should
remember that the perfectibility of man is only human and ter-
restrial perfectibility. Cold will still freeze, and fire will
never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder,
and death to terrify mankind. Emulation next to self-preservation
will forever be the great spring of human actions, and the balance
of a well-ordered government will alone be able to prevent that
emulation from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular
rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody,
civil wars.
The great question will forever remain, who shall work? Our
species cannot all be idle, Leisure for study must ever be the
portion of a few. The number employed in government must forever be
very small. Food, raiment, and habitations, the indispensable wants
of all, are not to be obtained without the continual toil of
ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind. As rest is rapture to the
weary man, those who labor little will always be envied by those
who labor much, though the latter in reality be probably the most
enviable. With all the encouragements, public and private, which
can ever be given to general education, and it is scarcely possible
they should be too many or too great, the laboring part of the
people can never be learned. The controversy between the rich and
the poor, the laborious and the idle, the learned and the ignorant,
distinctions as old as the creation, and as extensive as the globe,
distinctions which no art or policy, no degree of virtue or
philosophy can ever wholly destroy, will continue, and rivalries
will spring out of them. These parties will be represented in the
legislature, and must be balanced, or one will oppress the other.
There will never probably be found any other mode of establishing
such an equilibrium, than by constituting the representation of
each an independent branch of the legislature, and an independent
executive authority, such as that in our government, to be a third
branch and a mediator or an arbitrator between them. Property must
be secured, or liberty cannot exist. But if 'unlimited or
unbalanced power of disposing property, be put into the hands of
those who have no property, France will find, as we have found, the
lamb committed to the custody of the wolf. In such a case, all the
pathetic exhortations and addresses of the national assembly to the
people, to respect property, will be regarded no more than the
warbles of the songsters of the forest. The great art of law-giving
consists in balancing the poor against the rich in the legislature,
and in constituting the legislative a perfect balance against the
executive power, at the same time that no individual or party can
become its rival. The essence of a free government consists in an
effectual control of rivalries. The executive and the legislative
powers are natural rivals; and if each has not an effectual control
over the other, the weaker will ever be the lamb in the paws of the
wolf. The nation which will not adopt an equilibrium of power must
adopt a despotism. There is no other alternative. Rivalries must be
controlled, or they will throw all things into confusion; and there
is nothing but despotism or a balance of power which can control
them. Even in the simple monarchies, the nobility and the
judicatures constitute a balance, though a very imperfect one,
against the royalties.
Let us conclude with one reflection more which shall barely be
hinted at, as delicacy, if not prudence, may require, in this
place, some degree of reserve. Is there a possibility that the
government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the
most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and
that this all is without a father? Is this the way to make man, as
man, an object of respect? Or is it to make murder itself as
indifferent as shooting a plover, and the extermination of the
Rohilla nation as innocent as the swallowing of mites on a morsel
of cheese? If such a case should happen, would not one of these,
the most credulous of all believers, have reason to pray to his
eternal nature or his almighty chance (the more absurdity there is
in this address the more in character) give us again the gods of
the Greeks; give us again the more intelligible as well as more
comfortable systems of Athanasius and Calvin; nay, give us again
our popes and hierarchies, Benedictines and Jesuits, with all their
superstition and fanaticism, impostures and tyranny. A certain
duchess, of venerable years and masculine understanding, said of
some of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, admirably well,
-"On ne croit pas dans le Christianisme, mais on croit toutes les
sottises possibles."
The End
|
