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balance of power bilaterally that confront us on our midoceanic base. If we admit that human nature changes but little and if we take heed from history, it follows inexorably that the expression of our influence transoceanically will require naval powerenough obvious naval power to maintain the balances peacefully if wars are to be avoided.

It is not to be expected that transient public officials, with little background or experience in overseas affairs, should have a comprehensive grasp of such matters. But at least they might inform themselves as to what really happened at the Washington Conference and how such personal unpreparedness then permitted Anglo-Japanese coöperation to reduce our capital preponderance below parity with the British and to minimize our transpacific power by limiting our bases there. And before committing the country to another naval conference, they might inform themselves as to the definite prospect that the British and Japanese will support each other at it in an attempt, first, to abolish capital ships so that cruisers would become the premier ships and the 5-5-3 ratio would be changed to about 2-6-3-with us a poor 2-and, second, to abolish submarines so that their own little island homelands will be less vulnerable and our transoceanic influence will be further reduced. Then we may expect that emotional efforts contrary to the teachings of history will subside and that the United States will become a stronger influence in maintaining peace if possible and proper policies in any event.

WILLIAM HOWARD GARDINER.

ADAMS AND JEFFERSON: 1826-1926

BY FRANCIS N. THORPE

ONE hundred years ago, on July fourth, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died: Jefferson at the age of eighty-two; Adams, eight years older. Half a century earlier, the United States declared its Independence in a Proclamation now long recognized as the principal State paper of modern times. With this State paper the names of Jefferson and Adams are associated, the one as its author, the other as its chief defender or, as Webster describes Adams, "our Colossus on the floor". The careers of Adams and Jefferson disclose a remarkable parallel. Both were leaders in the old Congress. Both were Ministers abroad. Both served as Vice-President. Each served in the Constitutional Convention of his native State. Adams, of Harvard, while yet abroad, wrote and published for the instruction of Europe his Defense of the American Constitutions; Jefferson, of William and Mary, his Notes on Virginia. Both long since were numbered with the "Fathers", whose patriotic labors "brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.'

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Congress, by recent resolution, would commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Jefferson, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of American Independence,July 4, 1926. The resolution makes no mention of Adams. Doubtless the very omission of his name tells the whole story. For many years a powerful political party in this country has celebrated Jefferson's birthday by an annual dinner, a political feast as it were, a religious ceremony, after the ancient, classic model. No like homage has ever been paid to John Adams. The dying Jefferson requested Madison: "Remember me when I am gone;"-a request which has been faithfully obeyed by millions. John Adams's dying words, "Thomas Jefferson still lives," have

proved prophetic. Sixty-six years ago, Abraham Lincoln, acknowledging an invitation from Boston "to attend a festival in honor of the birthday of Thomas Jefferson," expressed an opinion which has long been public opinion in America:

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities". Another bluntly calls them "self-evident lies". And others insidiously argue that they apply to "superior races". These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect -the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson-to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

Again, in his First Inaugural, Lincoln, referring to an opinion of Adams, declared that, in legal contemplation, "The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the 'Articles of Association' in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence, in 1776;"-a doctrine advanced by John Adams, in his special message to the Senate on the death of Washington, in 1799: a doctrine of which, if Adams was not the parent, he was an early, possibly the first, disciple.

The little that is popularly known of Adams is derived, chiefly, from Webster's commemorative oration on Adams and Jefferson, and this little is from that passage purporting to be Adams's defense of the Declaration at a moment when its adoption was uncertain. This speech, preserved for generations in schoolreaders, was wholly imaginary with Webster. The entire passage is not only a fine but a rare illustration of that power of which Macaulay, writing of Pilgrim's Progress, remarks that "It is not

easy to make a simile go on all fours," or "to make things which are not seem as if they are". This Webster had done. The imagined speech of the eloquent Adams, and the silent Jefferson, are remembered; Adams, the real John Adams, is quite forgotten. Webster's oration discloses Webster as an Adams man. No one ever accused Webster of being a Jeffersonian. Yet the great name of Daniel Webster has not been sufficient to keep the name of John Adams apace with the name of Thomas Jefferson.

Among the eminent contemporaries of Adams and Jefferson was Alexander Hamilton, classed by posterity with Adams as a "High Federalist". Of the same political party as Adams, Hamilton not only ruined him politically but actually made Jefferson (his political enemy and the leader of Anti-Federalism) President, a political blunder which hastened the Federalist party to its grave. Adams had no Madison to support him in life, or to remember him when dead. Madison's (and Monroe's) devotion to Jefferson and Jeffersonism (and Madison was the survivor among the "Fathers", outliving Jefferson eleven years) contributed quite beyond political calculation to enthrone the political principles of Jefferson in America.

John Adams's son, the only son of a President who has become President, was Jeffersonian rather than Federalist in politics. He was "read out" of the Federalist Party and stood politically remote from his father. Not one of John Adams's successors in the Presidency has followed in his steps, while every Democratic President since his time, and there have been ten, has adhered, or claimed to adhere, to Jeffersonian principles. Even Lincoln, who repeatedly eulogizes Jefferson, pursued a policy, through his coalition Cabinet and otherwise, which historians pronounce Jeffersonian rather than of Adams. Nor has the trend in public affairs, other than Federal, been less Jeffersonian. In every State Constitutional Convention, the spirit of Jefferson has been a dominating force. A glance at the supreme laws of American Commonwealths discloses this trend: a dependent judiciary, elected for short terms, instead of an independent judiciary appointed for life; the limitation of executive power (more pronounced during the nineteenth than in the twentieth century); the enthronement of the legislative as the voice of the popular

will (though the trend in later years is to increase inhibitions on "special legislation"); rotation in office and short terms for officials (on the Jeffersonian theory of training the greatest number of the people for official service); State sovereignty (of which more was heard before the Civil War than has been heard since). Whether in Jefferson's mind State sovereignty and nullification meant secession and disruption of the Union, is a query variously answered before and since Appomatox.

And yet, he who would understand the principles of American government will find them examined, elaborated and applied in the writings of John Adams as by no other American. Referring to events in America culminating in the adoption of the Constitution, Adams said, in his inaugural: "Employed in the service of my country during the whole course of these transactions *** returning to the bosom of my country after a painful separation from it for ten years *** I have repeatedly laid myself under the most serious obligations to support the Constitution." Doubtless John Adams became President because he had been Vice-President, and the Electoral College at the time reflected the public mind, though he became President by three votes. The Braintree patriot seemed to the mass of his countrymen somewhat of a foreigner. He was elected as the most available party Four years later, Jefferson, "the man of the people," was saying in his first inaugural (and the words are still quoted on the lips of the people), "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists; equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.' The words caught the public ear and have held it for quite a century and a quarter; the words "entangling alliances with none" holding public attention in America like Lincoln's "One war at a time", or the popular variant in Wilson's time, "He kept us out of war", or Disraeli's words, long popular in England, on his return from the Berlin Conference, "Peace with honor".

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Despite the fact that John Adams gave the casting vote as Vice-President seventeen times, deciding most important issues; despite his services as President and his larger services as Minister abroad; despite his defense of the Declaration of Independence,

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