Adams controverts, maintaining in opposition to it that the social compact constituting the body-politic is, and by the law of nature must be, a compact not merely of individuals, but of families.

The philosophical examination of the foundations of civil society, of human governments, and of the rights and duties of man, he views as among the consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

The talisman of human rights dissolved the spell of political as well as of ecclesiastical power.

It cuts the gordian knot with the sword, extinguishes all the rights of man, and makes fear the corner-stone of government.

It is the only theory upon which slavery can be justified, as conformable to the law of nature.

The discourses of John Locke concerning government demolished while they immortalized the work of Filmer, whose name and book are now remembered only to be detested.

The constitution of the United States when adopted was so far from being considered as a democracy, that Patrick Henry charged it, in the Virginia Convention, with an awful squinting towards monarchy.

The tenth number of the Federalist, written by James Madison, is an elaborate and unanswerable essay upon the vital and radical difference between a democracy and a republic.

When the anti-federal party dropped the name of Republicans to assume that of Democrats, their principles underwent a corresponding metamorphosis; and they are now the most devoted and most obsequious champions of executive power--the very…

The name of Democracy was assumed because it was discovered to be very taking among the multitude; yet, after all, it is but the investment of the multitude with absolute power.

The constitutions of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are both the work of the people--one of the Union, the other of the State--not of the whole people by the phantom of universal suffrage, but of the whole…

Land-jobbing, stock-jobbing, slave-jobbing, rights-of-man-jobbing, were all, hand in hand, sweeping over the land like a hurricane.

The banks were plunging into desperate debts, preparing for a universal suspension of specie payment, under the shelter of legislative protection to flood the country with irredeemable paper.

Gambling speculation was the madness of the day; and, in the wide-spread ruin which we are now witnessing as the last stage of this moral pestilence, Texan bonds and Texan lands form no small portion of the fragments from the wreck of…

Adams, "I exposed the whole system of duplicity and perfidy towards Mexico, which had marked the Jackson administration from its commencement to its close.

But no sooner was John Tyler installed into the President's house than nullification, and Texas, and war with Mexico, rose again upon the surface, with eye steadily fixed upon the polar star of Southern slave-dealing supremacy in the…

Nullification was generated in the hot-bed of slavery.

That is the native land of nullification, and it is a theory of constitutional law worthy of its origin.

Democracy, pure democracy, has at least its foundation in a generous theory of human rights.

It is founded on the natural equality of mankind.

Democracy is self-government of the community by the conjoint will of the majority of numbers.

What communion, what affinity, can there be between that principle and nullification, which is the despotism of a corporation--unlimited, unrestrained, sovereign power?

Never, never was amalgamation so preposterous and absurd as that of nullification and democracy.

Slavery stands aghast at the prospective promotion of the general welfare, and flies to nullification for defence against the energies of freedom, and the inalienable rights of man.

The Southern or slave party, outnumbered by the free, are cemented together by a common, intense interest of property to the amount of twelve hundred millions of dollars in human beings, the very existence of which is neither allowed nor…