210 Chapter IX
cific and extended. This declaration must forbid hereditary distinctions, make all
offices elective, prohibit regulation of commerce, occupation, or religion, and abol-
ish all taxes except the tax on the product of land. Any piece of legislation affecting
the people’s rights must be ratified by the people itself, “because either the solution
of questions is self- evident and agreed upon, or cannot be legitimately found ex-
cept by the people as a whole.”^60 The people, as just noted, meant the proprietors of
land. And America proved all this:^61 “In observing how the Americans have
founded their peace and happiness on a few maxims that seem the naive expres-
sion of what common sense could have dictated to all men, we shall cease to vaunt
those complex machines... where so many counter- weights are supposed to pro-
duce a balance.... We shall see the danger... of those systems in which the law,
and hence truth, reason and justice, its immutable base, are forced to change ac-
cording to temperature, to bend before usages consecrated by prejudice, or the ab-
surdities adopted by each people.” Or, as Brissot said at this time, “Should the
thermometer determine human rights?” Or as Dupont de Nemours wrote to Jef-
ferson, “there is a perfect government, the beau idéal of government,” better than
even the Americans yet have, but which the nations will enjoy some day because of
the perfectibilité de l ’esprit humain.^62 Nothing could be further from Mably, or from
Adams, or even from Jefferson, all of whom preferred to trust in institutional ar-
rangements rather than in human nature or mere declared rights, to prevent the
usurpation of power.
A climax to the argument here narrated came with a pamphlet published in
America as a rebuttal to Adams and Delolme, and translated into French under a
different title, Examen du gouvernement de l ’Angle terre, with long anonymous notes
by Condorcet, Dupont de Nemours, and Philip Mazzei. It is illuminating to com-
ment on the role of this same pamphlet in the two countries.^63
Its author was believed to be Governor Livingston of New Jersey, but was actu-
ally John Stevens. Stevens was of what passed in America as the upper class. His
father had sat for thirteen years on the New Jersey governor’s council before the
Revolution, but had turned patriot during the war; he himself had acquired a mile-
square loyalist estate, for £18,340, overlooking the Hudson, the present site of
Stevens Institute, a pleasant tract which he was then laying out in parks and drive-
ways on the English model. Stevens was later to achieve fame, and greater wealth,
as the inventor of the screw propeller and builder of steamboats and railroads.^64
60 Ibid., I, 331.
61 Ibid., IV, 254.
62 Papers of Thomas Jefferson XII (Princeton, 1955), 326.
63 John Stevens, Observations on government, including some animadversions on Mr. Adams’ Defense
of the Constitutions... and on Mr. Delolme’s Constitution of England. By a Farmer of New Jersey (N.Y.,
1787). The French version was Examen du gouvernement de l ’Angleterre comparé aux constitutions des
Etats- Unis (Paris, 1789). This pamphlet, published anonymously, was long attributed to William Liv-
ingston. See A. D. Turnbull, John Stevens: An American Record (N.Y., 1928). For the French version see
R. Ciampini, Lettere di Filippo Mazzei alla corte di Polonia (Bologna, 1937), 121.
64 At about the time when John Stevens, under the anonymity of a farmer of New Jersey,” wrote
his critique of John Adams, his father, John Stevens, Sr., described by Forrest McDonald as a “wealthy
capitalist” and investor “in both real and personal property,” sat in the New Jersey state convention to
ratify the federal constitution. The elder Stevens then owned land valued at £62,500, and had interests