The material for this critical estimate must be sought, not so much in the events of our national career, as in the ideas which have influenced its course.  Closely as these ideas are associated with the actual course of American development, their meaning and their remoter tendencies have not been wholly realized therein, because beyond a certain point no attempt was made to think out these ideas candidly and consistently.  For one generation American statesmen were vigorous and fruitful political thinkers; but the time soon came when Americans ceased to criticise their own ideas, and since that time the meaning of many of our fundamental national conceptions has been partly obscured, as well as partly expressed, by the facts of our national growth.  Consequently we must go behind these facts and scrutinize, with more caution than is usually considered necessary, the adequacy and consistency of the underlying ideas.  And I believe that the results of such a scrutiny will be very illuminating.  It will be found that from the start there has been one group of principles at work which have made for American national fulfillment, and another group of principles which has made for American national distraction; and that these principles are as much alive to-day as they were when Jefferson wrote the Kentucky resolutions or when Jackson, at the dinner of the Jefferson Club, toasted the preservation of the Union.  But while these warring principles always have been, and still are, alive, they have never, in my opinion, been properly discriminated one from another; and until such a discrimination is made, the lesson cannot be profitably applied to the solution of our contemporary national problems.

All our histories recognize, of course, the existence from the very beginning of our national career of two different and, in some respects, antagonistic groups of political ideas,—­the ideas which were represented by Jefferson, and the ideas which were represented by Hamilton.  It is very generally understood, also, that neither the Jeffersonian nor the Hamiltonian doctrine was entirely adequate, and that in order to reach a correct understanding of the really formative constituent in the complex of American national life, a combination must be made of both Republicanism and Federalism.  But while the necessity of such a combination is fully realized, I do not believe that it has ever been mixed in just the proper proportions.  We are content to say with Webster that the prosperity of American institutions depends upon the unity and inseparability of individual and local liberties and a national union.  We are content to declare that the United States must remain somehow a free and a united country, because there can be no complete unity without liberty and no salutary liberty outside of a Union.  But the difficulties with this phrase, its implications and consequences, we do not sufficiently consider.  It is enough that we have found an optimistic formula wherewith to unite the divergent aspects of the Republican, and Federalist doctrines.