Europe and the American Revolution 207
one assembly, a few individuals would appropriate it for themselves. It was from
faulty arrangement of government, from ignorance of the doctrine of separation of
powers, from failure to provide an independent executive and to divide the legisla-
ture into two houses, that Geneva, Venice, Holland, Poland, and many others had
fallen under self- perpetuating oligarchic rule. He particularly invited Americans to
study the experience of the people of Geneva, “as enlightened as any,” who, how-
ever, had supinely given up their freedom, because they had never learned that the
people should combine with the syndics, and the syndics with the people, against
patrician encroachments. At Geneva, he warned, a mere dual balance between an
aristocratic and a democratic assembly had been proved to be futile; it was neces-
sary to have a third power, an independent executive. Likewise to have a single
chamber balanced by an independent executive would be only to have two armies
drawn up in battle. There must be a third element, a senate, to provide a balance.
Adams, like Delolme, arguing that the British constitution was the best in Eu-
rope, because it balanced the crown, the aristocracy, and the people, was obliged by
the necessities of his theory to believe the people were really represented in the
eighteenth- century House of Commons. He was aware that the House needed
reform if it was to be representative in any meaningful sense, as Delolme himself
had been in 1771; but he had no such strong feelings on the matter as Turgot and
Price and many others. To think that the Commons had become socially akin to
the Lords, or that the lower house was influenced, infiltrated, or “corrupted” by the
upper, would be to surrender his whole argument. In this one respect Adams, too,
was a doctrinaire, and what he could not assimilate was a particular set of facts. His
adversaries had reason to think him unreasonably Anglophile. Yet his doctrine is
still clear, whether or not it corresponded to the facts of British public life. The
doctrine was that an upper house and an independent executive would prevent
aristocratic domination.
Adams further perplexed his readers by his careless use of the word “orders.”
This was a fighting word for reformers. It signified corporate bodies and legal
stratification. Adams sometimes made himself clear enough. “In America,” he said,
“there are different orders of offices, but none of men.”^54 But he liked to refer to the
executive, senate, and popular assembly as “orders” of government, and to insist
that good government must be a “balance of three orders,” so that, though he was
neither a monarchist nor an aristocrat, and thought it best for executive and senate
to be popularly elected, his readers may be excused if they thought him an apolo-
gist for King, Lords, and Commons. His book was really too long even for con-
temporaries; his ideas were smothered by the profusion of exotic examples, most of
which did deal with real aristocracies and real kings.
Adams sent a copy of the Defense to Jefferson in Paris, who pronounced it a use-
ful and illuminating work, and tried to get it translated.^55 In this he failed; it was
not translated into French until 1792. Its length would deter a translator; it is pos-
sible also that Frenchmen of the kind interested in translation of American books,
such as Morellet, Condorcet, Dupont, or Brissot, were repelled by its doctrine, or
54 Work s, IV, 380.
55 Jefferson, Papers XI (Princeton, 1955), 177.