“The public will never be made to believe that an appointment of a relative is made on the ground of merit alone, uninfluenced by family views; _nor can they ever see with approbation offices, the disposal of which they intrust to their Presidents for public purposes, divided out as family property_. Mr. Adams degraded himself infinitely by his conduct on this subject, as General Washington had done himself the greatest honor. With two such examples to proceed by, I should be doubly inexcusable to err.”[92] After his retirement from the Presidency, in a letter to a kinsman, he asserts the rule again:-- “Towards acquiring the confidence of the people, the very first measure is to satisfy them of his disinterestedness, and that he is directing their affairs with a single eye to their good, and not to build up fortunes for himself and family; and especially that the officers appointed to transact their business are appointed because they are the fittest men, not because they are his relations. So prone are they to suspicion, that, where a President appoints a relation of his own, however worthy, they will believe that favor, and not merit, was the motive. I therefore laid it down as a law of conduct for myself, never to give an appointment to a relation.”[93] That statement is unanswerable. The elect of the people must live so as best to maintain their interests and to elevate the national sentiment. This can be only by an example of unselfish devotion to the public weal which shall be above suspicion. A President suspected of weakness for his relations is already shorn of strength. In saying that his predecessor “degraded himself infinitely by his conduct on this subject,” Jefferson shows the rigor of his requirement. Besides the transfer of his son, John Quincy Adams, from one diplomatic mission of lower grade to another of a higher, John Adams is responsible for the appointment of his son-in-law, Colonel Smith, as surveyor of the port of New York, and his wife’s nephew, William Cranch, as chief-justice of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia,--both persons of merit, and the former “serving through the war with high applause of his superiors.”[94] The public sentiment appears in the condemnation of these appointments. In refusing another of his relations, we have already seen[95] that John Adams wrote: “You know it is impossible for me to appoint my own relations to anything without drawing forth a torrent of obloquy.” But this torrent was nothing but the judgment of the American people unwilling that republican institutions at that early day should suffer.