V

This Inquiry, being a reflection of late eighteenth-century political science, can best be understood in the light of the political philosophy of the time. It fitted into a sequence of polemic writing which had started during the Revolution. The progress of the struggle for independence and effective government in America had stimulated a mass of writing, both theoretical and practical, since Europe’s political philosophers and statesmen, particularly in France, had been keenly interested in various aspects of the contest. The efforts at constitution-making by the states and the Confederation received careful attention and editions in French translation were printed as early as 1778. The French statesman, Turgot, studied them and wrote a criticism of these constitutions that year which was published after his death in 1784. He concentrated particularly on division of power and the checks and balances which were the pride of American constitutiori-making. He felt that an effective state must have its powers concentrated in one sovereign body, not divided. From other quarters there was criticism that these htates were not democratic and that the will of the people could be too easily checked or circumvented. Then in 1786 a civil disturbance over mortgage foreclosures in Massachusetts, known as Shays Rebellion, gave emphasis to such strictures.

These criticisms moved John Adams, then American minister at the Court of St. James’s, to take up his pen. When he was so moved, nothing could stop him, and the result was a three-volume work, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. In this heavy opus he sought to answer Turgot’s criticism and also a work, The Excellency of a Free State, by an Englishman of radical leanings, Marchamont Nedham. He surveyed a great variety of governments, related their history at length and came to certain conclusions. Mankind, he decided, was naturally unfitted to rule itself and therefore not to be trusted; governments must be so organized as to check man’s depraved tendencies. The various types of government devised so far were unsatisfactory. Aristocratic or monarchical governments tended to be despotic. Democracy, which Adams believed to be the worst of governments, led to the despotism of the mob or its leaders, or to anarchy.

The only way to produce good government was to unite these types in a balanced form, with a strong executive, checked by a legislature representing the aristocratic and the democratic elements in its two houses. It was hoped that in this way the best people, the natural aristocrats, the well-born, rich, talented and virtuous could be given a reasonable predominance in government, checked always by the representatives of the mass in one of the houses of the legislature.

This system of checks and balances was described by Adams in the first volume of his book which was ready in time to be in the hands of some of those making the Constitution in 1787. A similar system was devised and incorporated in that instrument, not because of Adams’ eloquence, but because colonial and British experience had directed the thoughts of the drafters in that channel.

Their work raised apprehensions among many who thought the new system might curtail liberty; and so three of the most gifted of the advocates of the Constitution undertook to urge its adoptmn m a series of essays printed in the newspapers, known as the Federalist papers. They, likewise, had recourse to history and showed that government without authority was ineffective and productive of anarchy. A government must have power and at the same time must allow mankind the enjoyments of rights and liberty; the federal republic with its represemative system was designed to do just that. The checks and balances would prevent any faction, interest or pressure group from getting undue control. The central, federal power was to be a stabilizing influence, not an oppressive instrument.

The arguments of Adams and of the authors of the Federalist long disturbed Taylor and men of his sympathies. His experience with the new government from 1789 to 1811 only confirmed him in a growing apprehension that something of great value to the world, which America had produced, was being perverted. He felt impelled to work out a counter-philosophy which should commend itself to his fellowmen and give them a platform on which to rally in their effort to awaken the American people to a sense of danger. So, twenty-seven years after John Adams’ volumes appeared, Taylor published his large book, the Inquiry, which was ostensibly in great part a refutation of Adams’ philosophy.

Taylor was neither an orderly thinker nor a concise writer. Also, whether consciously or unconsciously, he distorted Adams’ meaning. The latter was defending the type of government devised by certain states like Massachusetts before the Federal Constitution was drafted while Taylor argues as though he were describing the new national instrument. Also he was very slow and evidently started and stopped many times. His work therefore has changes of mood. It reflected his disagreement with Adams in 1787–88, his fear of Hamilton in 1790–93, his opposition to the Federalists, 1797–1801, and his disappointment in Jefferson in 1806–09. He also made use of ideas which he had published in pamphlet form and thoughts he had uttered in legislative chambers. As the most casual reader will see it is verbose, repetitive and disorganized. Also it is naive and unsophisticated in some respects; its author was the victim of the simplicity of social thought and the inadequacy of the social knowledge of the famous century of the Enlightenment.

Yet the Inquiry is surprisingly wise and clear-sighted. Taylor had read widely among the philosophers; Aristotle, Machiavelli. Locke, Sidney, Adam Smith, Malthus, the Physiocrats, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Godwin were known to him. He had devised a political theory which has a familiar sound to those who have walked with the eighteenth-century philosophers. This farmerpolitician was a devotee of the cult of Arcadian virtues—a very natural choice for him to make.

Man, he believed, was not depraved, he was dominated by moral qualities which might be either good or evil. Therefore it was essential that government should be devised to direct man in the path of virtue, to stimulate his good rather than his evil impulses. To this end government should be one of laws, not of men. Laws could be made on the basis of moral principles but men might well be dynamic zealots, demagogues who could not be trusted. Men in power would probably be guided by self-interest, would build support by granting special favours and thus would t produce an unjust distribution of property and a class of parasites.

Taylor’s reading of history, too, was quite extensive and he emerged from it with a deep conviction that power is corrupting. Throughout the development of the human race, despotism had appeared constantly, based upon superstition, force or unjust seizure of property. Priestly classes supporting divinely created monarchs, feudal aristocracies and their royal suzerains, and more recently stock-jobbing capitalists who supported kings and on occasion assumed titles of nobility, these, so far, had been the sum total of the results of man’s experience with government—with one exception: the United States.

This republic was the first attempt made to found a government on good moral principles. It had a government of law, no men were to be given much opportunity to feel the corrupting hand of power, for each community, or state, was to manage its own affairs and leave little to be done by the new federal government. The men, i.e. the officials, in this central government would be balanced by the men, i.e. the voters, in the local communities who in frequent elections would check any tendencies among those in the federal government to succumb to the lure of power. The United States, he asserted, was not a government of aristocrats and monarchs with only feeble checks by popular representatives in one house of Congress. Rather it was a government of plain men with little power in federal office, jealously watched by other plain men who came frequently to the polls to check. These same voters would also serve as the militia, so there would be no standing army to be useful in any abuse of power. Thus virtuous rational Arcadians, intelligent voters and sturdy militia men who peacefully cultivated their broad acres and kept up with the times, would preserve the moral principles upon which the new government was founded.

Such was the moral achievement in political science which Taylor believed the founders had desired. But, he lamented, it had soon been perverted. Men like Adams with his cult of aristocracy, men like Hamilton with their corrupt schemes of unjust property distribution at the expense of the Arcadians, were dangerous. All history had shown that those in office sought to take not only power but wealth. Hamilton by his plans for funding the debt, establishing a bank and enacting a protective tariff had enriched speculators, stock jobbers, and parasites at the expense of the landholding taxpayers. This group was ready to support the central government in ever greater usurpations and injustices.

Not only must such schemes be guarded against eternally by a party alive to Republican virtues, such as Jefferson and his associates had led to power in 18oo, but there were more subtle dangers. Federal power, even in the hands of virtuous Arcadians, was corrupting. The noble Jefferson had fallen a victim of it, his administration had been autocratic and centralizing and not too unfriendly to speculative interests.

His safeguards against such perils were Spartan. He would shorten the terms of the president and senators, no executive should be eligible for re-election. The irresponsibility of the judiciary should be checked. There must be strict virtue and adherence to moral principles. Those in power must sternly put aside the temptation to favour a few or to distribute wealth by law. Government must protect, not distribute property. The federal government must be self-denying, exercise only a minimum of authority and leave the responsibilities of rule largely to the citizens of the states where Republican virtue could be better exercised by free Arcadians. They would be immune from the temptation of power, dwelling on their own farms, progressing by their own efforts towards that perfection which Taylor believed education and individual effort could achieve.

In one sense of course this is a very imperfect and simple philosophy, assuming as it did the continued prevalence of rural social organization and economy. Taylor grasped, few of the dynamic potentialities of the mechanization of life and industry. Nor were the evidences of evil, which he saw in Hamilton’s efforts to create sound credit and to encourage adequate industry, as convincing as he claimed. Subsidy was inevitable in a new undeveloped country; working against it was like Canute’s gesture against the fide. Also centralization was necessary, as Jefferson learned even if Taylor did not. Taylor’s understanding of the complexities of human behaviour was no clearer than those current in the Enlightenment.

On the other hand there is a decidedly modern note in all this, one which is typically American. Taylor may be said to be the first Muckraker. He anticipated the Populists, the Progressives and the New Dealers of a later day. He saw the evil of an alliance between government and business interests. He would drive the money changers from the temple. His strictures on the activities of banking corporations have the same basic meaning as those against railroads, trusts and utility-holding companies of a much later date. His attacks on the paper-holders, whom, he charged, Hamilton wished to enrich, were similar to later denunciations of bondholders, ‘bankers’, and malefactors of great wealth. His demand for strict regard for moral principles, and that those in office hold themselves bound by public trust to resist and overcome temptation, has been repeated by statesmen and reformers in every crisis since. These pleas for public morality are universals that bear no mark of any century but are prized in all.

So Colonel John Taylor wrote his book. A Virginia farmer, lawyer and politician, he assumed attitudes which had been typical of his time and residence. His political thinking was dominated by his situation in life and he evolved or accepted theories which accorded with his circumstances. When he was in the Senate and of the minority party he thought as the minority thought. When he returned to the Senate as one of the majority he, like Jefferson, put aside these scruples and proceeded unfettered. When he left the Senate a second time and saw his influence less than formerly, he again had doubts and even worried about Jefferson’s consistency. The evolution of Taylor’s thought illustrates very well a fact that political theorists have been known to neglect, namely that political theory is seldom the exercise in pure reason which its author believes it to be, but rather a reflection of some very practical experiences in the intriguing field of political endeavour and ambition.

Taylor’s writing continued after the publication of the Inquiry. In the next ten years he went back to the Senate for a brief term (1822–27) and published several more tracts, Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated (1820) New Views of the Constitution of the United States (1823) and Tyranny Unmasked (1822). He continued to see the dangers which government would create for itself by subsidy to business. He fought the protective tariff and the Bank of the United States and stressed even more vigorously the theory of a limited federal government and the paramount rights of the states. His various writings, never widely read, were used by others who could speak more coherently than he could write. They were translated into vigorous oratory, particularly by Calhoun and by other politicians and publicists who were becoming more and more concerned over the relation of the southern states to the Federal government. No small part of the oratorical contests which had so much to do with the coming of the Civil War were fought with the ideas of Taylor. But the Arcadian philosophy of a rural era could not solve the problems of a multiplying population in an age of cities and machines. Alas for the Arcadian dream of rural felicity!

The Inquiry was lost sight of for many years. It was never reprinted and was hard to secure as early as the 1830’s. Not until the twentieth century did it come to life. Then, when a more realistic school of historians and political scientists were seeking a ‘New History’, much of the old story was reassessed. In the United States, the public, aided by Gladstone and Lord Bryce, had accepted an idealized view of the nature of the American constitutions and the impulses of its founders. Charles A. Beard was not satisfied and went to Treasury records, pamphlets and the correspondence of the founders and produced an ‘economic interpretation’. He showed, as Taylor had done, how profitable had been the operation of the new constitution under the guidance of Hamilton’s policies. He noted Taylor’s penetration in detecting this over a century before and proclaimed Taylor’s work one of the ‘two or three really historic contributions to political science which have been produced in the United States’. Historians and political theorists have done much in recent years to explore Taylor’s thought and bring him forth as the ‘Philosopher of Jeffersonian Democracy’, the ‘most fruitful of Republican intellects’.

This plain Virginia farmer, it is now recognized, made a significant contribution to the debate over the limits of liberty and authority. Though he was weak in his understanding of the inevitability of some of the trends which he feared yet he was strong in his perception of the evils that threatened the American government and in his sturdy faith that public morality is essential in a democracy.

be it remembered, That on the fifteenth day of November, in the thirty-eighth year of the Independence of the United States of America, john taylor, of the said District, hath deposited in this Office, the Title of a Book, the right whereof he claims as Author, in the words following, to wit: . . .

‘An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, comprising nine sections, under the following heads: . . . I. Aristocracy. II. The Principles of the Policy of the United States, and of the English Policy. III. The Evil Moral Principles of the Government of the United States. IV. Funding V. Banking. VI. The Good Moral Principles of the Government of the United States. VII. Authority. VIII. The Mode of infusing Aristocracy into the Policy of the United States. IX. The Legal Policy of the United States. By john taylor, of Caroline county, Virginia.’

In conformity to the Act of the Congress of the United States, entitled ‘An Act for the encouragement of Learning, by securing the copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the Authors and Proprietors of such copies during the times therein mentioned;’ and also to an Act, entituled ‘An Act supplementary to an Act, entituled, “An Act for the encouragement of Learning, by securing the copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the Authors and Proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned;” and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of Designing, Engraving, and Etching historical and other prints.’