As I thumbed through the trove of Jeffrey Epstein emails released by Congress last week, I thought often of John Adams. The nation’s second president was not without his flaws, but they were typically outshone by his perceptive understanding of what republics like the early American state need if they are to endure.

Republics are so normative that it is easy to forget how rare they were when Americans broke away from the British Empire. When early American statesmen imagined their new republic, they had only a few examples to draw from: ancient Greek city-states, pre-Augustan Rome, the Italian merchant republics, and so on. A country without a king was an unusual thing.

Adams and his associates knew that these republics rarely endured. Sometimes they were simply conquered, as any nation might be, but more often than not they collapsed from within—typically felled by corruption and oligarchy. The Greeks elected tyrants. The Romans, who had seized power from kings, surrendered it to emperors. The Italians fell under the sway of wealthy nobles who treated public resources like family firms.

The United States could avoid that fate, Adams noted, by maintaining high moral standards. “Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue], and public virtue is the only foundation of republics,” he wrote to an acquaintance in June 1776. “There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honour, power, and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty.”

Reading the Epstein emails is like absorbing the negation of the Founders’ dream. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. It was generally understood even then that this was the tip of a rotten iceberg. Yet Epstein kept his place in elite society, maintaining quiet friendships with people from across the political and ideological spectrum.

There are a lot of conspiracies surrounding Epstein, an inevitability when a wealthy sexual predator with a lot of famous friends is found dead by suicide in a prison cell. The emails themselves do not describe specific criminal acts by anyone in particular, though they point toward unsavory behavior by more than a few people. What they do underscore, rather emphatically, is the utter absence of any sort of civic virtue.

Last week, members of the House Oversight Committee released thousands of pages of emails, text messages, and other documents that they had obtained from Epstein’s estate. He died in 2018 while awaiting trial on a host of charges related to underage sex trafficking. This trove is distinct from what many have called “the Epstein files,” which are the investigatory materials in the Justice Department’s possession.

First, Democrats on the committee released a tranche of documents that shed new light on Epstein’s relationship with Trump. The president famously does not text or email other people, so his own words aren’t present in the documents, but Epstein described his interactions with Trump to third parties. In one email, Epstein alleged that Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of Epstein’s victims, and in another, he claimed that Trump “knew about the girls,” an apparent reference to the financier’s sex-trafficking schemes.

Committee Republicans responded by releasing a much larger trove of documents that capture Epstein’s interactions with a significant chunk of what one might describe as the American elite. The contents are........

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