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> I'm looking for the quote : the Constitution is the chains that will > bind down the government. You are probably looking for the following quote: "It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights... Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power... Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." --Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:388
> thanks for your quick response : > I, think the quote : the Constitution is the chains that will bind the > government - was in a letter > thomas jefferson wrote to james madison. > hope you can find it. I do not think I have seen the exact words, "the Constitution is the chains that will bind the government." The quote I sent previously is the best known quote related to these ideas. Jefferson wrote to Madison the following, but it was not concerned with the Constitution: "This principle, that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,... will exclude... the ruinous and contagious errors... which have armed despots with means which nature does not sanction, for binding in chains their fellow-men." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:460 Jefferson also wrote the following about the new Spanish constitution: "[The] provision [in the new constitution of Spain] which, after a certain epoch, disfranchises every citizen who cannot read and write... is the fruitful germ of the improvement of everything good and the correction of everything imperfect in the present constitution. This will give you an enlightened people and an energetic public opinion which will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government." --Thomas Jefferson to Chevalier de Ouis, 1814. ME 14:130 I have doubts that Jefferson wrote the exact words, "the Constitution is the chain[s] that will bind the government." This sounds to me more like a loose modern interpretation of the quote I sent previously. You will notice that when Jefferson wrote about chains, it seems usually to be with reference to chaining persons or the aristocratic spirit, i.e., animate things. Chaining the government doesn't sound like something he would say, but I could be wrong on that. Notice in the last quote, he does not say, "...which will control and enchain the government." It is not government per se, but the perversions of government power that Jefferson is concerned with. He was a very precise thinker, and I think that he would more likely have been very specific about what was being chained.