A Moral and Religious People
John Adams, the second President of the USA, told army officers in Massachusetts that the Constitution he had helped to draw up could not guarantee them liberty.
1798
King George III 1760-1820
John Adams, the second President of the USA, told army officers in Massachusetts that the Constitution he had helped to draw up could not guarantee them liberty.
1798
King George III 1760-1820
On October 11th, 1798, President John Adams told officers of a Massachusetts militia brigade that the United States’ historic Constitution (which he had helped to write) was never about centralised Power. Unlike politicians over in Europe, he said, he would not promise to conjure up order out of a selfish, thoughtless and pleasure-seeking society.
WHILE our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence.
But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation* towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine* and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry,* would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.* Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.*
* Simulation here means ‘pretence, dishonesty.’
* ‘Rapine’ is violent robbery.
* ‘Gallantry’ is used today to mean honourable conduct in battle or towards a lady, but in past generations it could also carry a very negative connotation, implying fashionable immorality, a dandified and self-gratifying ‘gallantry’ that was intended to flirt, flatter and seduce.
* The great Athenian statesman Solon (?630-?555 BC) made the same kind of analogy, so Diogenes Laertius tells us in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. “He compared laws to spiders’ webs, which stand firm when any light and yielding object falls upon them, while a larger thing breaks through them and makes off.”
* “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws” John’s cousin Samuel Adams had written back in 1749 “will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.” See Edmund Burke on There is No Liberty without Self-Control.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.