Page:John Adams - A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America Vol. I. (1787).djvu/24

xvi erected oil the imple principles of nature: and if men are now ufficiently enlightened to diabue themelves of artifice, impoture, hypocriy, and upertition, they will conider this event as an æra in their hitory. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at preent little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curioity. It will never be pretended that any perons employed in that ervice had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inpiration of heaven, any more than thoe at work upon hips or houes, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that thee governments were contrived merely by the ue of reaon and the enes. As Copley painted Chatham, Wet, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery, as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries compoed their vere, and Belknap and Ramzay hitory; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhoue his planetarium; as Boylton practied inoculation, and Franklin electricity; as Paine expoed the mitakes of Raynal, and Jefferon thoe of Buffon, o unphiloophically borrowed from the Recherches Philoophiques ur les Americains, thoe depicable dreams of De Paw—neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or ub-committees, conidered legilation in any other light than