liberty and equality, the Jeffersonian Democrats have been found on the side of equality.  Representing as they did the democratic principle, it is perfectly natural and desirable that they should fight the battle of equality in a democratic state; and their error has been, not their devotion to equality, but their inability to discern wherein any antagonism existed between liberty and equality, and the extent to which they were sacrificing a desirable liberty to an undesirable equality.

On this, as on so many other points, Hamilton’s political philosophy was much more clearly thought out than that of Jefferson.  He has been accused by his opponents of being the enemy of liberty; whereas in point of fact, he wished, like the Englishman he was, to protect and encourage liberty, just as far as such encouragement was compatible with good order, because he realized that genuine liberty would inevitably issue in fruitful social and economic inequalities.  But he also realized that genuine liberty was not merely a matter of a constitutional declaration of rights.  It could be protected only by an energetic and clear-sighted central government, and it could be fertilized only by the efficient national organization of American activities.  For national organization demands in relation to individuals a certain amount of selection, and a certain classification of these individuals according to their abilities and deserts.  It is just this kind or effect of liberty which Jefferson and his followers have always disliked and discouraged.  They have been loud in their praise of legally constituted rights; but they have shown an instinctive and an implacable distrust of intellectual and moral independence, and have always sought to suppress it in favor of intellectual and moral conformity.  They have, that is, stood for the sacrifice of liberty—­in so far as liberty meant positive intellectual and moral achievement—­to a certain kind of equality.

I do not mean to imply by the preceding statement that either Jefferson or his followers were the conscious enemies of moral and intellectual achievement.  On the contrary, they appeared to themselves in their amiable credulity to be the friends and guardians of everything admirable in human life; but their good intentions did not prevent them from actively or passively opposing positive intellectual and moral achievement, directed either towards social or individual ends.  The effect of their whole state of mind was negative and fatalistic.  They approved in general of everything approvable; but the things of which they actively approved were the things which everybody in general was doing.  Their point of view implied that society and individuals could be made better without actually planning the improvement or building up an organization for the purpose; and this assertion brings me to the deepest-lying difference between Hamilton and Jefferson.  Jefferson’s policy was at bottom the old fatal