The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
BRITAIN / CONSTITUTION OF
I am much indebted for your kind letter of February the 29th, and for
your valuable volume on the English constitution. I have read this
with pleasure and much approbation, and think it has deduced the
constitution of the English nation from its rightful root, the
Anglo-Saxon. It is really wonderful, that so many able and learned men
should have failed in their attempts to define it with correctness. No
wonder, then, that Paine, who thought more than he read, should have
credited the great authorities who have declared, that the will of
parliament is the constitution of England. So Marbois, before the
French Revolution, observed to me, that the Almanac Royal was the
constitution of France. Your derivation of it from the Anglo-Saxons,
seems to be made on legitimate principles.
And although this
constitution was violated and set at naught by Norman force, yet force
cannot change right.
It has ever appeared to me, that the
difference between the Whig and the Tory of England is, that the Whig
deduces his rights from the Anglo-Saxon source, and the Tory from the
Norman. And Hume, the great apostle of Toryism, says, in so many
words, note AA to chapter 42, that, in the reign of the Stuarts, "it
was the people who encroached upon the sovereign, not the sovereign
who attempted, as is pretended, to usurp upon the people." This
supposes the Norman usurpations to be rights in his successors. And
again, C 159, "the commons established a principle, which is
noble in itself, and seems specious, but is belied by all history and
experience,
that the people are the origin of all just power." And
where else will this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his
fellow men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the
majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in an
individual of that minority?
Our revolution commenced on more favorable ground. It presented us an
album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no
occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or
to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry.
We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts
.
br> We have not yet so far perfected our constitutions as to
venture to make them unchangeable. But still, in their present state,
we consider them not otherwise changeable than by the authority of the
people, on a special election of representatives for that purpose
expressly: they are until then the lex legum.
But can they be made unchangeable? Can one generation bind another,
and all others, in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has
made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can
only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed
with will. The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which
composed their bodies, make part now of the bodies of other animals,
vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms. To what then are
attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men? A
generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life;
when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the
rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their
laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable
but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.
to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824
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