sympathized with the view of his friend Paine, and never wavered in his belief that the French Revolution was necessary and beneficial.  A generous and gifted nation strangled, moved him to deeper compassion than a class proscribed.  He dwelt more upon the long and bitter provocation, than upon the brief frenzy which was only one of its dire results.  Louis XIV. and Louis XV., picturesque as they were, excited within him a profounder horror than ugly Marat and Robespierre.  He pitied haggard, distracted France more than graceful and high-bred Marie Antoinette.  In other words, he was not a tory.

There was a difference, too, between Mr. Jefferson and his young kinsman on the points upon which they agreed.  Jefferson was a States’ Rights man, and a strict constructionist, because he was a republican; Randolph, because he was a Virginian, Jefferson thought the government should be small, that the people might be great; John Randolph thought the government should be small, that Virginia might be great.  Pride in Virginia was John Randolph’s ruling passion, not less in 1790; than in 1828, The welfare and dignity of man were the darling objects of Thomas Jefferson’s great soul, from youth to hoary age.

Here we have the explanation of the great puzzle of American politics,—­the unnatural alliance, for sixty years, between the plantation lords of the South and the democracy of the North, both venerating the name of Jefferson, and both professing his principles.  It was not, as many suppose, a compact of scurvy politicians for the sake of political victory.  Every great party, whether religious’ or political, that has held power long in a country, has been founded upon conviction,—­disinterested conviction.  Some of the cotton and tobacco lords, men of intellect and culture, were democrats and abolitionists, like Jefferson himself.  Others took up with republicanism because it was the reigning affectation in their circle, as it was in the chateaux and drawing-rooms of France.  But their State pride it was that bound them as a class to the early Republican party.  The Southern aristocrat saw in Jefferson the defender of the sovereignty of his State:  the “smutched artificer” of the North gloried in Jefferson as the champion of the rights of man.  While the Republican party was in opposition, battling with unmanageable John Adams, with British Hamilton, and with a foe more powerful than both of those men together, Robespierre,—­while it had to contend with Washington’s all but irresistible influence, and with the nearly unanimous opposition of educated and orthodox New England,—­this distinction was not felt.  Many a tobacco aristocrat cut off his pig-tail and wore trousers down to his ankles, which were then the outward signs of the inward democratic grace.  But time tries all.  It is now apparent to every one that the strength of the original Democratic party in the South was the States’ Rights portion of its platform, while in the North it was the sentiment of republicanism that kept the party together.