At the time when he set himself to counterwork Hamilton, American statesmanship was likely to be directed only to making Government strong and to ensuring the stability of the business world; for reaction against the bloody absurdities that had happened in France was strong in America, and in English thought, which still had influence in America, it was all-powerful.  Against this he asserted an intense belief in the value of freedom, in the equal claim of men of all conditions to the consideration of government, and in the supreme importance to government of the consenting mind of the governed.  And he made this sense so definitely a part of the national stock of ideas that, while the older-established principles of strong and sound government were not lost to sight, they were consciously rated as subordinate to the principles of liberty.

It must not be supposed that the ascendency thus early acquired by what may be called liberal opinions in America was a matter merely of setting some fine phrases in circulation, or of adopting, as was early done in most States, a wide franchise and other external marks of democracy.  We may dwell a little longer on the unusual but curiously popular figure of Jefferson, for it illustrates the spirit with which the commonwealth became imbued under his leadership.  He has sometimes been presented as a man of flabby character whose historical part was that of intermediary between impracticable French “philosophes” and the ruffians and swindlers that Martin Chuzzlewit encountered, who were all “children of liberty,” and whose “boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant was that their bright home was in the Settin’ Sun.”  He was nothing of the kind.  His judgment was probably unsound on the questions of foreign policy on which as Secretary of State he differed from Washington, and he leaned, no doubt, to a jealous and too narrow insistence upon the limits set by the Constitution to the Government’s power.  But he and his party were emphatically right in the resistance which they offered to certain needless measures of coercion.  As President, though he was not a great President, he suffered the sensible course of administration originated by his opponent to continue undisturbed, and America owed to one bold and far-seeing act of his the greatest of the steps by which her territory was enlarged.  It is, however, in the field of domestic policy, which rested with the States and with which a President has often little to do, that the results of his principles must be sought.  Jefferson was a man who had worked unwearyingly in Virginia at sound, and what we should now call conservative, reforms, establishing religious toleration, reforming a preposterous land law, seeking to provide education for the poor, striving unsuccessfully for a sensible scheme of gradual emancipation of the slaves.  In like manner his disciples after him, in their several States, devoted themselves to the kind of work in removing manifest abuses and