206 Chapter IX
citizens to excite clamors and uneasiness” against the executive, which is the es-
sence of government.^51
These wealthy and illustrious citizens, according to Adams, would reduce the
executive to a nullity if they could. They would also nullify popular influence in the
legislature if the legislature met as a single house. “The rich, the well- born and the
able,” he declared in a phrase often quoted out of context, “acquire an influence
among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense,
in a house of representatives. The most illustrious of them must, therefore, be sepa-
rated from the mass, and placed by themselves in a senate; this is, to all honest and
useful intents, an ostracism.”^52 In short, the rich should be made to sit apart in a
house of their own, not to protect their own interests, and not because in a popular
one- chamber system the people would despoil them, but for the opposite reason,
because if the rich sat in a one- chamber house they would corrupt the popular
representation, and despoil the people. It is possible to think that Adams was mis-
taken in believing an upper house would have the effects he expected; but it is
hardly possible, since hypocrisy is one fault of which he has never been accused, to
mistake the drift of his thought. It was, quite as much as Turgot’s, antiaristocratic.
Adams shared with Mably a sense of the less agreeable traits of human nature.
He did not expect much from the unaided virtue and enlightenment of either
common or uncommon men—it was his one trait of conservatism. Americans, he
repeatedly said, were no different from and no better than Europeans. “There is no
special Providence for Americans, and their nature is the same as that of others.”^53
Toward the end of his work, as with inexhaustible patience he analyzed the minus-
cule medieval republic of Montepulciano, he went into a digression on the Ameri-
can Cincinnati, whose fancy for hereditary honors and titles seemed to him to
show the beginning of the very process which he had now traced in Europe and in
antiquity dozens of times. In America, too, he thought, people easily fell into the
habit of accepting the leadership of a few families; in the simplest New England
town meetings, he observed, men of the same families were elected to office for
four and five generations. In America, too, there were “aristocratical passions,” in-
satiable like all passions—pride, vanity and ambition, the love of gold, the love of
praise, the love of domination, the love of position. There were tendencies to lead
and to follow, to dominate and to submit; there was a love of equality, but also a
love of inequality, a desire to possess or to excel. Since these traits could not be
eradicated, the problem was to combine, adapt, utilize, and restrain them for the
public good.
The burden of Adams’ Defense was therefore to show that if America followed
Turgot’s advice it would end up like most of Europe. As soon as all power was in
51 Work s, IV, 585.
52 Work s, IV, 290. Adams expressed the same views in correspondence with Jefferson in later life:
“ Yo u r aristoi are the most difficult animals to manage in the whole theory and practice of government.
They will not suffer themselves to be governed.” He rejected Jefferson’s distinction between natural
and pseudo- (or good and bad) aristocracies, regarding all forms of superiority, leadership, excellence,
or talent as liable to much the same dangers of abuse. He lacked Jefferson’s belief in the virtues of an
elite. See his letters to Jefferson of July 9 and November 15, 1813, in P. Wilstach, Correspondence of
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Indianapolis, 1925).
53 Work s, IV, 401.