principles.  Legitimists, Imperialists, Republicans, Socialists, and Communists are all in favor of a centralized and unlimited government.  The last two classes wish to exercise the governing power upon the minutest details of life,—­to establish public baths, shops, theatres, dwellings, to control the amusements and direct the occupations of the citizen, and to divide his social status by law.  Comte himself, whose general system might be expected to lead him to a different conclusion, outdoes them all, and proposes to prescribe creeds, establish fasts, feasts, and forms of worship, and even to name those who shall receive divine honors.  There is no trace here of that scrupulous regard for personal independence and that invincible distrust of governmental action which characterized Jefferson.  It is true, he and the Gallic writers agreed upon certain fundamental propositions; but they were peculiar neither to him nor them.  Some of the same principles were announced by Locke and Beccaria, by Hobbes, who maintained the omnipotence of the state, and by Grotius, who insisted upon the divine right of kings.  To agree with another upon certain matters does not make one his disciple.  No one mistakes the doctrines of Paul for those of Mohammed, because both taught the immortality of the soul.  To confound Jefferson with Rousseau or Condorcet is about as reasonable as to confound Luther with Loyola, or Ricardo with Jeremy Bentham.

Although we deny that Jefferson was indebted to France for his political system, it cannot be claimed that he was the author of it.  He himself used to assert, that the scheme of a limited and decentralized government was produced by the events which caused the settlement of the country and the subsequent union of the colonies.  The emigration to America was stimulated by the great Protestant and Catholic dispute which occupied Europe nearly two centuries, and during which time the original thirteen colonies were founded.  The sentiment of religious freedom was the active principle of all the alliances, wars, intrigues, and adventures of that stormy period.  The rights of conscience were maintained, in defiance of the rack and the stake.  They were stubbornly asserted in regard to the smallest matters.  Lines of separation, so fine as hardly to be perceptible, were defended to the last.  The Catholic was not more irreconcilably opposed to the Protestant, than the Lutheran to the Quaker, or the Puritan to the Baptist.  Men who differed merely about the meaning of a single passage of Scripture thought each other unfit to sit at the same table.  The immigrants were exiles.  By the conditions under which they acted, as being from the defeated party, and as being among those whom defeat did not subdue, they must have had the enthusiasm of their time in its most earnest form.  Each man came here intent upon his right to worship God in his own way. That he could never forget.  It had been impressed upon him by everything which can affect the understanding or touch the heart of man,—­by the memory of success and defeat,—­by his own sufferings and the martyrdom of his brethren,—­by Bunyan’s fable and by Milton’s song.