However, it was not the Embargo, nor the meditated treason of Aaron Burr, nor the purchase of Louisiana, important as these were, which gives chief interest to the eight years of Jefferson’s administration, and made it a political epoch.  It was the firm growth and establishment of the Democratic party, of which Jefferson was the father and leader, as Hamilton was the great chieftain of the Federalist.  With the accession of Jefferson to power, a new policy was inaugurated, which from his day has been the policy of the government, except in great financial emergencies when men of brain have had the direction of public affairs.  Democratic leaders like Jackson and Van Buren, representing the passions or interests or prejudices of the masses, it would seem, have been generally unfortunate enough to lead the country into financial difficulties, because they have conformed to the unenlightened instincts of the people rather than to the opinions of the enlightened few,—­great merchants, capitalists, and statesmen, that is, men of experience and ability.  And when these men of brain have extricated the country from the financial distress which men inexperienced in finance and ignorant of the principles of political economy have brought about, the democratic leaders have regained their political ascendency, since they appealed, more than their antagonists, to those watchwords so dear to the American heart, the abolition of monopolies, unequal taxation, the exaltation of the laboring classes,—­whatever promises to aggrandize the nation in a material point of view, or professes to bring about the reign of “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” and the abolition of social distinctions.

It cannot be doubted that the policy of Jefferson, while it appealed to the rights and interests of “working-men,” of men who labor with their hands rather than by their brains, has favored the reign of demagogues,—­the great curse of American institutions.  Who now rule the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago?  Is it not those who, in cities at least, have made self-government—­the great principle for which Jefferson contended—­almost an impossibility?  This great statesman was sufficiently astute to predict the rule of the majority for generations to come, but I doubt if he anticipated the character of the men to whom the majority would delegate their power.  Here he was not so sagacious as his great political rivals.  I believe that if he could have foreseen what a miserable set the politicians would generally turn out to be,—­with their venality, their unscrupulousness, their vile flatteries of the people, their system of spoils, their indifference to the higher interests of the nation,—­his faith in democracy as a form of government would have been essentially shaken.  He himself was no demagogue.  His error was in not foreseeing the logical sequence of those abstract theories which made up his political religion,—­the religion of humanity, such as the French philosophers had taught him.  But his theories pleased the people, and he himself was personally popular,—­the most so of all our statesmen, not excepting Henry Clay, who made many enemies.