JOHN ADAMS 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. Our form of government, inestimable as it is, exposes us, more than any other, to the insidious intrigues and pestilent influence of foreign nations. Nothing bur our inflexible neutrality can preserve us. The national defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman. Liberty must at all hazards by supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honour, power and glory, established in the minds of people, or there can be no republication government nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions. Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. Abigail Adams: I am more and more convinced that a man is a dangerous creature and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave cries, Give, Give. Power naturally grows. Why? Because human passions are insatiable. The President has, or ought to have, the whole nation before him, and he out to select the men best qualified and most meritorious for offices at this own responsibility, without being shackled by an check by law, constitution, or institution. Without this unrestrained liberty, he is not a check upon the legislative power nor either branch of it. Indeed, he must be the slave of the party that brought him in. The question fore the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles. Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion? 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 me; 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. When public virtue is gone, when the national spirit is fledthe republic is lost in essence, though it may still exist in form. Instead of adoring a Washington, mankind should applaud the nation which educated himI glory in the character of a Washington because I know him to be only an exemplification of the American character. In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress.