from place to place, at
home and abroad, wherever any purpose, personal or political, may
thereby be promoted.

"To this final object of simplifying the machine two other maxims have
been proclaimed as auxiliary fundamental principles of this
administration. First, that the contest for place and power, in this
country, is a state of war, and all the emoluments of office are the
spoils of victory. The other, that it is the invariable rule of the
President to reward his friends and punish his enemies."

In the course of the years 1832 and 1833, Freemasonry having become
mingled with the politics of the period, Mr. Adams openly avowed his
hostility to the institution, and addressed a series of letters to
William L. Stone, an editor of one of the New York papers, and another
to Edward Livingston, one of its high officers, and a third to the
Anti-masonic Convention of the State of New York, in which his views,
opinions, and objections to that craft, are stated and developed with
his usual laborious, acute, and searching pathos and power.

In October, 1833, Mr. Adams was applied to by one of his friends for
minutes of the principal measures of Mr. Monroe's administration, while
he was Secretary of State, and also of his own, as President of the
United States, to be used in his defence in a pending election. "I
cannot reconcile myself," said Mr. Adams, "to write anything for my own
election, not even for the refutation of the basest calumnies. In all my
election contests, therefore, my character is at the mercy of the basest
slanderer; and slander is so effective a power in all our elections,
that the friends of the candidates for the highest offices use it
without scruple. I know by experience the power of party spirit upon the
people. Party triumphs over party, and the people are all enrolled in
one party or another. The people can only act by the machinery of
party."

About this time there was an attempt in Norfolk County to get up a
Temperance Society, and a wish was expressed to him that he would take a
lead in forming it. He declined from an unwillingness to shackle himself
with obligations to control his individual, family, and domestic
arrangements; from an apprehension that the temperance societies, in
their well-intended zeal, were already manifesting a tendency to
encroach on personal freedom; and also from an opinion that the cause
was so well sustained by public approbation and applause that it needed
not th