Late American Statesmen, No. II [pp. 95-119]

ZA TE AMERICAN STA TESMEN.
spite of the purity with which its patronage was administered, in
spite of the rare talents of its chiefs, failed; and it is well that it
failed. Had it succeeded in its South American protectorate,
it would have made us responsible for a half dozen anarchies
which, when they are not devouring one another, are devouring
themselves. Had it succeeded in its internal improvements, it
would have laid on the country an intolerable debt spent in the
construction of useless turnpikes and canals; it would have transferred our domestic carrying-trade from competent private management to incompetent public management; it would have
given to the government patronage that no government can
safely administer; and it would have enlarged the limits of the
constitution so as not only to seriously diminish the local efficiency of the States, but to assign to the central authorities a
supremacy inconsistent with the genius of our institutions.
-uba, it is true, might have been annexed; but this would probably have led to a new war with England, and certainly to an
increase of strength in the slave interest which would have rendered much more doubtful the struggle that was to come between the free and the slave States.
Yet it is impossible to view the downfall of Mr. Adams's
administration without a sigh. It was the last of that line of
closely allied administrations in which the secretary of state
succeeded his own chief in the presidential chair, to be followed
by his own secretary of state. It retained unchanged, except so
far as death or some rare case of personal delinquency made a
change necessary, the public servants transmitted to it by prior
administrations. It was therefore the last administration that
refused to remove a subaltern for political dissent. The admin istration is picturesque in its austerity; picturesque in its rela tions to the past; picturesque in the ruin in which It was finally
involved. For the first time since the overthrow of Mr. Adams's
father, had come into power a new party imposing proscrip tion on the chiefs of the old. There is a pathetic contrast
in the bearing of the two great men on whom the storm con centrated. Each had remarkable courage, but their courage was
not of the same type. Mr. Adams would have attacked singly
any fortress in his way, and as he did not need the enthusiasm
of party to spur him to the onset, so there was no community
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