the senate be under to partiality in the trial of officers of whom they had a voice in the appointment? Can they be disposed to favor a person who has violated his trust and their confidence?

The other evils you mention, that may result from this power, appear to me but barely possible. The senators will doubtless be in general some of the most respectable citizens in the states for wisdom and probity, superior to mean and unworthy conduct, and instead of undue influence, to procure appointments for themselves or their friends, they will consider that a fair and upright conduct will have the best tendency to preserve the confidence of the people and of the states. They will be disposed to be diffident in recommending their friends and kindred, lest they should be suspected of partiality; and the other members will feel the same kind of reluctance, lest they should be thought unduly to favor a person, because related to a member of their body; so that their friends and relations would not stand so good a chance for appointment to offices, according to their merit, as others.

The senate is a convenient body to advise the president, from the smallness of its numbers. And I think the laws would be better framed and more duly administered, if the executive and judiciary officers were in general members of the legisla ture, in case there should be no interference as to the time of attending to their several duties. This I have learned by experience in the government in which I live, and by observation of others differently constituted. I see no principles in our constitution that have any tendency to aristocracy, which, if I understand the term, is a government by nobles, independent of the people, which cannot take place, in either respect, without a total subversion of the constitution. As both branches of Congress are eligible from the citizens at large, and wealth is not a requisite qualification, both will commonly be composed of members of similar circumstances in life. And I see no reason why the several branches of the government should not maintain the most perfect harmony, their powers being all directed to one end, the advancement of the public good.

If the president alone was vested with the power of appointing all officers, and was left to select a council for himself, he would be liable to be deceived by flatterers and pretenders to

patriotism, who would have no motive but their own emolument. They would wish to extend the powers of the executive to increase their own importance; and, however upright he might be in his intentions, there would be great danger of his being misled, even to the subversion of the constitution, or, at least, to introduce such evils as to interrupt the harmony of the government, and deprive him of the confidence of the people. But I have said enough upon these speculative points, which nothing but experience can reduce to a certainty.

I am, with great respect,

Your obliged humble servant,
ROGER SHERMAN.

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

THE treatises on the principles of Government, written by Mr. Adams, appeared at a time of great popular agitation in Europe and the United States, and furnished ready materials for use in the political contentions of the day. They were immediately attacked in the American newspapers and in pamphlets, as intended to subvert, instead of sustaining the republican forms already established, and to introduce the English system of hereditary orders, a monarch and a house of lords. Although there is no just foundation for this charge, yet there can be no doubt that the tendency of the reasoning was all of it calculated to resist the current setting at the moment with great force towards unlimited democracy. The French revolution first roused this power, nor did it seriously decline, until the popular excesses to which it led awakened the minds of men to a sense of the dangers of the one, not less than of the other extreme. The writings of Mr. Adams, which had been directed to the same end, were then tacitly admitted to have force in them, even by many whose feelings and sympathies led them to regret that it was not otherwise. The popular impression had been made, from his opposition to the new theory of liberty, that he favored the old one of absolutism, and it became fixed by the circumstances attending the struggle at the close of the century, in which Mr. Adams's position identified him with the success or failure of that party in the country supposed to hold the only conservative opinions.

It was perfectly natural, that, in violent party times, the sentiments and the language of the author, seldom guardedly expressed, should be subjected to all sorts of perversion and misrepresentation. Though fully sensible of this, and keenly alive to it, it does not appear that he ever took any steps to correct the impressions sought to be produced in the public mind. It was not until the publication, in 1814, by John Taylor of Caroline, Virginia, of an elaborate volume of six hundred and fifty pages, entitled "An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States," and containing a running Commentary upon the Defence, that he was roused to make any reply. Mr. Taylor had been in the senate at the time he presided over that body; had subsequently led the opposition in the Virginia House of Delegates to his administration, by moving the celebrated resolutions of 1798, drawn up by Mr. Madison; and had always shown himself a conscientious and manly, though an earnest opponent of his theories of government and system of policy. It was Mr. Taylor's book, then, though he frankly admitted his own disbelief that anybody ever would read it through, that Mr. Adams selected as the medium of a general reply to the strictures which had been made upon his own. Mr. Taylor's work, the