The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 7 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and PrivateJefferson, Thomas
Philosophy
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 7 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
SIR,--Your favor of the 7th is just now received. The letter to which
it refers was written by me with the sole view of recommending to the
study of my fellow citizens a book which I considered as containing
more genuine doctrines on the subject of our government, and carrying
us back more truly to its fundamental principles, than any one which
had been written since the adoption of our constitution. As confined
to this object, I thought, and still think, its language as plain and
intelligible as I can make it. But when we see inspired writings made to
speak whatever opposite controversialists wish them to say, we cannot
ourselves expect to find language incapable of similar distortion. My
expressions were general; their perversion is in their misapplication
to a particular case. To test them truly, they should turn to the book
with whose opinion they profess to coincide. If the book establishes that
a State has no right to tax the monied property within its limits, or
that it can be called, as a party, to the bar of the federal judiciary,
then they may infer that these are my opinions. If no such doctrines
are there, my letter does not authorize their imputation to me.
It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from
its expression, (although I do not choose to put it into a newspaper,
nor, like a Priam in armor, offer myself its champion,) that the germ
of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the
federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a
scare-crow,) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little
to-day and a little to-morrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a
thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from
the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. To this
I am opposed; because, when all government, domestic and foreign, in
little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of
all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government
on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government
from which we separated. It will be as in Europe, where every man must
be either pike or gudgeon, hammer or anvil. Our functionaries and theirs
are wares from the same work-shop; made of the same materials, and by
the same hand. If the States look with apathy on this silent descent of
their government into the gulf which is to swallow all, we have only to
weep over the human character formed uncontrollable but by a rod of iron,
and the blasphemers of man, as incapable of self-government, become his
true historians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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