Amidst this mass of approbation which is given to every other part of the work, there is a single sentiment which I cannot help wishing to bring to what I think the correct one; and, on a point so interesting, I value your opinion too highly not to ambition its concurrence with my own.  Stating in volume first, page sixty-third, the principle of difference between the two great political parties here, you conclude it to be, ’whether the controlling power shall be vested in this or that set of men.’  That each party endeavors to get into the administration of the government, and to exclude the other from power, is true, and may be stated as a motive of action:  but this is only secondary; the primary motive being a real and radical difference of political principle.  I sincerely wish our differences were but personally who should govern and that the principles of our constitution were those of both parties.  Unfortunately, it is otherwise; and the question of preference between monarchy and republicanism, which has so long divided mankind elsewhere, threatens a permanent division here.

Among that section of our citizens called federalists, there are three shades of opinion.  Distinguishing between the leaders and people who compose it, the leaders consider the English constitution as a model of perfection, some, with a correction of its vices, others, with all its corruptions and abuses.  This last was Alexander Hamilton’s opinion, which others, as well as myself, have often heard him declare, and that a correction of what are called its vices, would render the English an impracticable government..  This government they wished to have established here, and only accepted and held fast, at first, to the present constitution, as a stepping-stone to the final establishment of their favorite model.  This party has therefore always clung to England, as their prototype, and great auxiliary in promoting and effecting this change.  A weighty minority, however, of these leaders, considering the voluntary conversion of our government into a monarchy as too distant, if not desperate, wish to break off from our Union its eastern fragment, as being, in truth, the hot-bed of American monarchism, with a view to a commencement of their favorite government, from whence the other States may gangrene by degrees, and the whole be thus brought finally to the desired point.  For Massachusetts, the prime mover in this enterprise, is the last State in the Union to mean a final separation, as being of all the most dependant on the others.  Not raising bread for the sustenance her own inhabitants, not having a stick of timber for the construction of vessels, her principal occupation, nor an article to export in them, where would she be, excluded from the ports of the other States, and thrown into dependance on England, her direct and natural, but now insidious, rival?  At the head of this minority is what is called the Essex Junto of Massachusetts.  But the majority of these leaders do not aim at separation.