bsurd as to propose the people
collectedly will consent to the prostration of their liberties; but if
they be not shielded by some constitutional checks, they will suffer
them to be destroyed--to be destroyed by demagogues, who at the time
they are soothing and cajoling the people, with bland and captivating
speeches, are forging chains for them; demagogues who carry, daggers in
their hearts, and seductive smiles in their hypocritical faces, who are
dooming the people to despotism, when they profess to be exclusively the
friends of the people; against such designs and such artifices, were our
constitutional checks made, to preserve the people of this country.

* * * * *

=_Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826._= (Manual, pp. 486, 490.)

From his "Inaugural Address", March 4th, 1801.

=_61._= ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc
of one quarter of the globe, too high-minded to endure the degradations
of the others, possessing a chosen country with room enough for our
descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation, entertaining a
due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the
acquisitions of our industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow
citizens, resulting not from birth but from our actions and their sense
of them, enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and
practised, in various forms, yet all of them including honesty, truth,
temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring
an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that
it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness
hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us
a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens, a
wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one
another, which 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.

About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which
comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper that
you should understand what I deem the essential principles of
our government, and consequently those which ought to shape its
ad