in future, blotted it out of existence.  There was left but one party, the federal party; and it, strong as it appeared, was really in almost as precarious a position as its former opponent, because of the very completeness of its success in achieving its fundamental object.  Hamilton and Jefferson, two of its representative members, were opposed in almost all the political instincts of their natures; the former chose the restraints of strong government as instinctively as the latter clung to individualism.  They had been accidentally united for the time in desiring the adoption of the Constitution, though Hamilton considered it only a temporary shift for something stronger, while Jefferson wished for a bill of rights to weaken the force of some of its implications.  Now that the Constitution was ratified, what tie was there to hold these two to any united action for the future?  Nothing but a shadow—­the name of a party not yet two years old.  As soon, therefore, as the federal party fairly entered upon a secure tenure of power, the divergent instincts of the two classes represented by Hamilton and Jefferson began to show themselves more distinctly until there was no longer any pretence of party unity, and the democratic (or republican) party assumed its place, in 1792-3, as the recognized opponent of the party in power.  It would be beside the purpose to attempt to enumerate the points in which the natural antagonism of the federalists and the republicans came to the surface during the decade of contest which ended in the downfall of the federal party in 1800-1.  In all of them, in the struggles over the establishment of the Bank of the United States and the assumption of the State debts, in the respective sympathy for France and Great Britain, in the strong federalist legislation forced through during the war feeling against France in 1798, the controlling sympathy of the republicans for individualism and of the federalists for a strong national government is constantly visible, if looked for.  The difficulty is that these permanent features are often so obscured by the temporary media in which they appear that the republicans are likely to be taken as a merely State-rights party, and the federalists as a merely commercial party.

To adopt either of these notions would be to take a very erroneous idea of American political history.  The whole policy of the republicans was to forward the freedom of the individual; their leader seems to have made all other points subordinate to this.  There is hardly any point in which the action of the individual American has been freed from governmental restraints, from ecclesiastical government, from sumptuary laws, from restrictions on suffrage, from restrictions on commerce, production, and exchange, for which he is not indebted in some measure to the work and teaching of Jefferson between the years of 1790 and 1800.  He and his party found the States in existence, understood well that they were convenient shields for the individual against the possible powers of the new federal government for evil, and made use of them.  The State sovereignty of Jefferson was the product of individualism; that of Calhoun was the product of sectionalism.