The report then proceeds to show the several developments of this new and most unfortunate condition of the general government, effected by "a system of continual and unrelenting exercise of executive legislation,"—by the alternate gross abuse of constitutional power, and bold assumption of powers never vested in him by any law,—resulting in four several vetoes, which, in the course of fifteen months, had suspended the legislation of the Union. It then states and comments upon the reasons assigned by the President for returning this bill to the House of Representatives, with his objections to it, as specified in the veto message referred to this committee; and, after a rigid analysis and course of argument, pronounces them "feeble, inconsistent, and unsatisfactory;" after which the report proceeds:
"They perceive that the whole legislative power of the Union has been, for the last fifteen months, with regard to the action of Congress upon measures of vital importance, in a state of suspended animation, strangled by the five times repeated stricture of the executive cord. They observe that, under these unexampled obstructions to the exercise of their high and legitimate duties, they have hitherto preserved the most respectful forbearance towards the Executive Chief; that while he has time after time annulled, by the mere act of his will, their commission from the people to enact laws for the common welfare, they have forborne even the expression of their resentment for these multiplied insults and injuries. They believed they had a high destiny to fulfil, by administering to the people, in the form of law, remedies for the sufferings which they had too long endured. The will of one man has frustrated all their labors, and prostrated all their powers. The majority of the committee believe that the case has occurred, in the annals of our Union, contemplated by the founders of the constitution, by the grant to the House of Representatives of the power to impeach the President of the United States; but they are aware that the resort to that expedient might, in the present condition of public affairs, prove abortive. They see the irreconcilable difference of opinion and of action between the legislative and executive departments of the government is but sympathetic with the same discordant views and feelings among the people. To them alone the final issue of the struggle must be left. In sorrow and mortification, under the failure of all their labors to redeem the honor and prosperity of their country, it is a cheering consolation to them that the termination of their own official existence is at hand; that they are even now about to return to receive the sentence of their constituents upon themselves; that the legislative power of the Union, crippled and disabled as it may now be, is about to pass, renovated and revivified by the will of the people, into other hands, upon whom will devolve the task of providing that remedy for the public distempers which their own honest and agonizing energies have in vain endeavored to supply.
"The power of the present Congress to enact laws essential to the welfare of the people has been struck with apoplexy by the executive hand. Submission to his will is the only condition upon which he will permit them to act. For the enactment of a measure, earnestly recommended by himself, he forbids their action, unless coupled with a condition declared by himself to be on a subject so totally different that he will not suffer them to be coupled in the same law. With that condition Congress cannot comply. In this state of things he has assumed, as the committee fully believe, the exercise of the whole legislative power to himself, and is levying millions of money upon the people, without any authority of law. But the final decision of this question depends neither upon legislative nor executive, but upon judicial authority; nor can the final decision of the Supreme Court upon it be pronounced before the close of the present Congress. In the mean time, the abusive exercise of the constitutional power of the President to arrest the action of Congress upon measures vital to the welfare of the people has wrought conviction upon the minds of a majority of the committee that the veto power itself must be restrained and modified by an amendment of the constitution itself; a resolution for which they accordingly herewith respectfully report."
The report was signed by ten members of the committee, including the chairman. The resolution with which it closed provided for submitting to the States a proposed modification of the constitution, by substituting the words "majority of the whole number," instead of the words "two thirds," by which the power of the House of Representatives to pass a law, notwithstanding the veto of the President, is at present restricted.
The report was agreed to in the house by a majority of one hundred ayes to ninety nays, and the resolution itself passed by a majority of ninety-eight ayes to ninety nays; but the constitution, in such cases, requiring two thirds majority, it was of consequence rejected.
In November, 1842, Mr. Adams delivered a lecture before the Franklin Lyceum, at Providence, Rhode Island, on the Social Compact, in which he enters into "an examination of the principles of democracy, aristocracy, and universal suffrage, as exemplified in a historical review of the present constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with some notice of the origin of human government, and remarks on the theories of divine right, as maintained by Hobbes and Sir Robert Filmer, on one side, and by Sydney, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, on the other."
He shows, from the history of Massachusetts, that the fundamental principle asserted in the fifth article of our declaration of rights, that all power resides originally in the people, is derived from the above-named writers, and explains how this power has been practically exercised by the people of that state. The assertion of Rousseau, that the social compact can be formed only by unanimous consent, because the rule itself that a majority of votes shall prevail can only be established by agreement, that is, by compact, Mr. Adams controverts, maintaining in opposition to it that the social compact constituting the body-politic is, and by the law of nature must be, a compact not merely of individuals, but of families. On this view of the subject he largely animadverts. The philosophical examination of the foundations of civil society, of human governments, and of the rights and duties of man, he views as among the consequences of the Protestant Reformation. The question raised by Martin Luther involved the whole theory of the rights of individual man, paramount to all human authority. The talisman of human rights dissolved the spell of political as well as of ecclesiastical power. The Calvinists of Geneva and the Puritans of England contested the right of kings to prescribe articles of faith to their people, and this question necessarily drew after it the general question of the origin of all human government. In search of its principle, Hobbes, a royalist, affirmed that the state of nature between man and man was a state of war, whence it followed that government originated in conquest. This theory is directly opposite to that of Jesus Christ. It cuts the gordian knot with the sword, extinguishes all the rights of man, and makes fear the corner-stone of government. It is the only theory upon which slavery can be justified, as conformable to the law of nature. This is Sir John Falstaff's law, when, speaking of Justice Shallow, he says, "If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature why I may not snap at him." Sir Robert Filmer, by a theory far more plausible, though not more sound, than that of Hobbes, derived the origin of human government from the Scriptures of the Old Testament, from the grant of the earth to Adam, and afterwards to Noah.
But the vital error of Filmer was in assuming that the natural authority of the father over the child was either permanent or unlimited; and still more that the authority of the husband over the wife was unlimited. Sir Robert Filmer did not perceive that by the laws of nature and of God every individual human being is born with rights which no other individual, or combination of individuals, can take away; that all exercise of human authority must be under the limitation of right and wrong; and that all despotic power over human beings is exercised in defiance of the laws of nature and of God—all, Sir John Falstaff's law of nature between the young dace and the old pike.
The history of Filmer's work was remarkable. It was composed and published in the heat of the struggle between King Charles the First and the Commons of England, which terminated in the overthrow of the monarchy, and in the death of King Charles upon the scaffold. It was the theory of government on which the cause of the house of Stuart was sustained. No man can be surprised that such a cause was swept away by a moral and political whirlwind; that it carried with it all the institutions of civil society, so that its march was a wild desolation. James, by relying on the principles of Filmer's theory, fell back into the arms of the Church of Rome, and vainly struggled to turn back the tide of religious reformation, and revive the divine right of kings, and passive obedience, and non-resistance. The republican spirit had slumbered on the white cliffs of Albion, and in his sleep, like the man-mountain in Lilliput, had been pinned down to the earth by the threads of a spider's web for cords. On the first reäppearance of Filmer's book, he awoke, and, like the strong man in Israel, at the cost of his own life, shook down the temple of Dagon, and buried himself and the Philistines again under its ruins.
The discourses of John Locke concerning government demolished while they immortalized the work of Filmer, whose name and book are now remembered only to be detested. But the first principles of morals and politics, which have long been settled, acquire the authority of self-evident truths, which, when first discussed, may have been vehemently and portentously contested. John Locke, a kindred soul to Algernon Sydney, seven years after his death published an elaborate system of government, in which he declares the "false principles and foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and overthrown." Subsequently, he published an essay concerning the true original extent and end of civil government. "The principles," says Mr. Adams, "of Sydney and Locke constitute the foundation of the North American Declaration of Independence; and, together with the subsequent writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau, that of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and of the constitution of the United States." Neither of these constitutions separately, nor the two in combined harmony, can, without a gross and fraudulent perversion of language, be termed a Democracy. They are neither democracy, aristocracy, nor monarchy. They form together a mixed government, compounded not only of the three elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, but with a fourth added element, Confederacy. The constitution of the United States when adopted was so far from being considered as a democracy, that Patrick Henry charged it, in the Virginia Convention, with an awful squinting towards monarchy. The tenth number of the Federalist, written by James Madison, is an elaborate and unanswerable essay upon the vital and radical difference between a democracy and a republic. But it is impossible to disconnect the relation between names and things. When the anti-federal party dropped the name of Republicans to assume that of Democrats, their principles underwent a corresponding metamorphosis; and they are now the most devoted and most obsequious champions of executive power—the very life-guard of the commander of the armies and navies of this Union. The name of Democracy was assumed because it was discovered to be very taking among the multitude; yet, after all, it is but the investment of the multitude with absolute power. The constitutions of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are both the work of the people—one of the Union, the other of the State—not of the whole people by the phantom of universal suffrage, but of the whole people by that portion of them capable of contracting for the whole. They are not democracy, nor aristocracy, nor monarchy, but a compound of them all, of which democracy is the oxygen, or vital air, too pure in itself for human respiration, but which in the union of other elements, equally destructive in themselves and less pure, forms that moral and political atmosphere in which we live, and move, and have our being.