John Adams on virtue
Including the citizens - not just the politicians,
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate
the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate
their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of
meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in
every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and
creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an
anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life
or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these
will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues
and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science,
to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one
or a very few.
Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence
than the body can live and move without a soul.
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection,
safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or
private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people
alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute
government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their
protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
The general principles
on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of
Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those
general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the
existence and attributes of God.
John Adams wrote that
“equal liberty required every member of society to acquire land so that the
multitude may be possessed of small estates. Whenever there is in any country
uncultivated lands and unemployed poor,” Adams continued, “it is clear that the
laws of property have been so far extended as to violate a natural right.”
Noah Webster wrote An equal distribution of land represented the founders’ vision of freedom in America.
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