Being urged to use his influence that the language and policy of the government should be as moderate and guarded as possible, from the consideration that both England and France were profoundly impressed with the idea that we were an ambitious, encroaching people, Mr. Adams replied: "I doubt if we should give ourselves any concern about it. Great Britain, who had been vilifying us for twenty years as a low-minded nation, with no generous ambition, no God but gold, had now changed her tune, and was endeavoring to alarm the world at the gigantic grasp of our ambition. Spain and all Europe were endeavoring to do the same; being startled at first by our acquisition of Louisiana, and now by our pretensions to extend to the South Sea. Nothing we can say will remove this impression until the world shall be familiarized with the idea of considering the continent of North America to be our proper dominion. From the time we became an independent people, it was as much a law of nature that this should become our pretension, as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea. Spain had pretensions on our southern, Great Britain on our northern borders. It was impossible that centuries should elapse without finding them annexed to the United States; not from any spirit of encroachment or of ambition on our part, but because it was a physical, and moral, and political absurdity, that such fragments of territory, with sovereigns fifteen hundred miles beyond sea, worthless and burdensome to their owners, should exist, permanently, contiguous to a great, powerful, enterprising, and rapidly-growing nation. Most of the territories of Spain in our neighborhood had become ours by fair purchase. This rendered it more unavoidable that the remainder of the continent should ultimately be ours. It was but very lately we had seen this ourselves, or that we had avowed the pretension of extending to the South Sea; and, until Europe finds it to be a settled geographical element that the United States and North America are identical, any effort on our part to reason the world out of the belief that we are an ambitious people will have no other effect than to convince them that we add to our ambition hypocrisy." Concerning the discords which arose in the cabinet, on policy to be pursued, Mr. Adams remarked: "I see them with pain, but they are sown in the practice which the Virginia Presidents have taken so much pains to engraft on the constitution of the Union, making it a principle that no President can be more than twice elected, and whoever is not thrown out after one term of service must decline being a candidate after the second. This is not a principle of the constitution, and I am satisfied it ought not to be. Its inevitable consequence is to make every administration a scene of continuous and furious electioneering for the succession to the Presidency. It was so through the whole of Mr. Madison's administration, and it is so now."