State of Parties and the Country [pp. 1-53]

State of Parties and the Country.
philosophers. But Jefferson was himself no dreamer. He
was a man of the world, though a theorist. He knew men
no less than books. His faculty was never too much sublimed for practice. He could assimilate his dream for
daily use, and adapt it to human exigencies. In this lay
his great secret. While thousands before Jefferson had
thought of the same things, and entertained the same faith
in what might be done for, and by, man, he was better able
than all his predecessors, so to reconcile his ideal, with the
real around him, as to render their assimilation possible.
He was successful. and we have the result-Democracy!
This w-as inevitable; and any result short of this, such as
Hamilton and Adams might have predicated of their conception of a government framed like ours, would only prove
that tl-hey had not pursued the subject to its definite conclusion, and knew leasf men than of philosophy. A country
without privileged orders, without connection of church andstate. without a monarch, hereditary or elective, without social castes, already organized, could result in nothing less
than a purely popular government. And such Jefferson felt
that it must be, and his shaping hands were applied to nothing less than this production. Not that we are at all sure
of his definitions of democracy. He, himself, would never
have contemplated that government of the people, either in
confederacy or state, which should shake off the restraints
of the constitution from the one, or deprive the other of the
veto privilege; or confound in the public mind the very different ideas of a people having a natural right to choose
their own rulers, and one in which all possessed equally the
right to govern.
But the Federalists did not yield the struggle easily.
They made hard fight, and, under different designations, designed for popular effect, and thus tending indirectly to the
maintenance of Jefferson's argument, they have continued
the fight to the present day and, with occasional successes,
which they either knew not how to employ to their own ad vantage, or with such radical difficulties of principle in their
way, that success itself seemed to harbinger mortification,
and the very possession of power became an edged tool in
LJuly,
4