Preamble

When we consider that this government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states; that the states themselves have principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices or officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily, and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote...Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies, and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it may never be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earning on which it can subsist, government shall itself consume the residue of what it was instituted to guard.³


Taxes and Spending

Fellow Citizens - a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.¹

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.⁹

Taxes on consumption, like those on capital or income, to be just, must be uniform.¹⁰


States Rights

Whenever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.⁷

[I support] the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations of our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies.¹


Trade

[I support] cherished mutual interests and intercourse of fair and equal terms.²

But should any nation, contrary to our wishes, suppose it may better find its advantage by continuing its system of prohibitions, duties and regulations, it behooves us to protect our citizens, their commerce and navigation, by counter prohibitions, duties and regulations, also. Free commerce and navigation are not to be given in exchange for restrictions and vexations; nor are they likely to produce a relaxation of them.¹⁵


Foreign Relations

Our circumstances, our pursuits, our interests, are distinct. The principles of our policy should be so also. All entanglements with [other] quarter[s] of the globe should be avoided¹¹

I am for free commerce with all nations, political connection with none, and little or no diplomatic establishment.⁸


Education

I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.¹²

Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation...I suppose an amendment to the constitution, by consent of the States, necessary, because the objects now recommended are not among those enumerated in the constitution, and to which it permits the public moneys to be applied.⁴


The Judiciary

At the establishment of our Constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions nevertheless become law by precedent, sapping by little and little the foundations of the Constitution and working its change by construction before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all liability to account.¹³

Let the future appointments of judges be...renewable by the President and Senate. This will bring their conduct at regular periods under revision and probation¹⁴


Constitutional Revision

Let us provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods...It is for the peace and good of mankind that a solemn opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years should be provided by the constitution, so that it may be handed on with periodical repairs from generation to generation to the end of time, if anything human can so long endure.⁶


Conclusion

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people." To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.⁵



Notes

1   First Inaugural Address
2   Second Inaugural Address
3   First Annual Message To Congress
4   Sixth Annual Message To Congress
5   Opinion on Constitutionality of Bank
6   Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1816
7   Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, 1798
8   Letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1799
9   Note in Tracy's "Political Economy," 1816
10  Letter to Samuel Smith, 1823
11  Letter to J. Correa de Serra, 1820
12  Letter to William Jarvis, 1820
13  Letter to A. Coray, 1823
14  Letter to William Barry, 1822
15  Report on the Privileges and Restrictions on the Commerce
      of the United States in Foreign Countries, 1793