deficiences, the well-tried intelligence and virtue of his fellowcitizens, and the councils of those representing them in the other departments associated in the care of national interests."

In the Convention of 1787 he had acted with the "nationals," though he kept on friendly relations with the friends of strictly federal institutions. Jefferson drew him over to, what were called the Republicans; but the co-operation with Hamilton in the publication of "The Federalist " left a warm side in his heart to that statesman. Whether, if Hamilton had been alive, when Madison was President, there would ever have been a full reconciliation and then an influence on him through Hamilton, is of course conjecture, but this much is certain, Madison had a leaning away from Jefferson as well as one to him. It was only Madison's yielding disposition, in the absence of another strong mind, that made him step so closely in the footsteps of Jefferson. He felt grateful to him for much assistance received from him in his great desire for literary culture; but still more for having been made his Secretary of State, and thereby, as Jefferson intended it, to be indicated to the country as the successor.

Madison was made Secretary of State by Jefferson more because he wished to indicate him as his successor, than on account of any special fitness for the position. Madison was the first prominent person that could belong to a school without avowing devotion to its extremer doctrines; indeed he was allowed to disavow and to counteract them, because he understood how to do it without giving offence. His great usefulness as legislator in Virginia, and as a member of the constitutional Convention of 1787, was that he mediated between the extremists, and harmonized persons and things seemingly irreconcilable. A large number of public men, who were undecided in their views, gradually got into the habit of looking to Madison as the indicator how far it was safe to go, and this gave the side he took the preponderance. Now Madison was a sincere republican, and more the disciple of Jefferson than of anybody else, but he was neither a blind nor an out and out follower. In fact, he was not a consistent partisan by the standard of our day. Jefferson needed him, but he also needed Jefferson, and without co-operation both would have failed in their careers. It was necessary to Madison to have Jefferson's indorsement, for without it he could not have had the cordial support of the republicans, while, on the other hand, Madison's support of Jefferson held back much opposition, which the more conservative of the land, especially in Virginia, felt strongly inclined to make to the latter.

We must analyze Madison's conduct on the Resolutions of

'98; on the war policy of Jefferson against Great Britain; the terms of peace he accepted after the war of 1812; his signature to the United States Bank Act, 1816; his acquiescence in the tariff of 1816; and his policy as to appointments, to comprehend Madison's real relation to American politics. Read the Kentucky Resolutions prepared by Jefferson, then Madison's report thereon, then the issues upon which the campaign of 1800 was fought, by Jefferson and Madison, against Adams and Hamilton, and it will appear plainly, that in Madison we have the prototype of the many American politicians, who ostensibly are members of a party; but have in their breasts views of their own, which, when they are placed in power, makes them rasp off the sharper points of their school, and to bring it within the great necessities of the nation, or, as some would say the logic of events. Mr. Jefferson's acquiescence in the toning down of the Resolutions of Kentucky, his placing Madison at the head of his administration and making him his successor, as well as his friendship for him to the end, is hardly explainable, except by understanding the necessity Madison was to him and his school as a mediator. It was not until 1832, after Jackson's purpose to revive the old Jeffersonian school in its pristine objects had fully developed, that the difference of Madison's actions, with them, became fully manifest. They troubled Jackson and his friends severely.

Jefferson's method of indicating his successor was continued by Madison, and Monroe, who, having been Madison's Secretary of State, became the President 1817-25. The system, if such it can be called, then broke down under the rivalries between Crawford, Adams, Clay, Jackson, Clinton, and Calhoun. New men, new ways, and a new people seemed to have come upon the political stage; but we think, that there was nothing more than old things gone to seed.

Had the people not been party blinded and they might have seen in the treaty of peace that closed the war of 1812;— the second United States bank,-the tariff of 1816,-the entry of federalists in the public service as members of the party in power, that something entirely different from the public partisan representations was going on beneath the surface; that public questions were raised, agitated, and then dropped again from party considerations, and that this party work injured the country's dearest interests. This necessitated measures for public relief; but as the party in power could not allow that to be done, which would have eradicated the evil, there was no other remedy except to do patchwork, and thus cover the fissures which party work made in public affairs. The treaty of

peace was such a patch; it was to heal the rents caused by the Hartford Convention. The United States bank was another; it was to cure the vicious paper currency issued during the war. The tariff was the third; it was to remedy the disordered finances. A fourth was the permission of federalists to hold office under republican administrations, provided they changed nominally their politics. The last was the greatest necessity of all, because proscribing one-half of the material, fit for office, as a party principle, and the other half in obedience to the tricksters of the party in power, had then, as it ever will, tattered and torn the habiliments of the administration, and they pled for coverings over their nakedness.1 Madison was a good mender, indeed, we may say, he was the first and best President in that line; and he could not have been this if he had been the partisan bigot, which those who voted for him meant him to be, and his opponents so much feared.

Patching and mending public clothes, torn by carrying party shibboleths to ultimatums, has since been again and again the main work of our Presidents. Madison did it well, and the people stood it well, though there were some growlers. The Hartford Convention chagrined Madison the most, for the rent it made looked like the logical result of the Resolutions of '98; the very resolutions which he believed to have made harmless, by precluding the states-veto against "measures warranted by the Constitution." Surely, thought he: a war with a foreign power, and that power England, must be constitutional; and to oppose it, even if goaded to it by party . and sectional prescription, must be treason! And when the Convention added opposition to western and south-western acquisitions of territory, and revived the anti-alien animosities; was it not point blank proof, that New England was not American in the full sense? What say you then, you American people? Had we not better rally round our party and sing the chorus: Let us have peace!

But the war had, as all wars do, laid its eggs for future political troubles. The finances of the country had been conducted on state-banks' currency, and ended in pecuniary chaos, just as was the case through the paper money issues by the Colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for their wars, and as occurred with the continental money issued during the Revolution. Madison, after declining a re-charter of Hamilton's bank, yielded soon afterwards to the charter of a United States bank, for the purpose of bringing order out of that chaos. The tariff of 1816 was adopted

1 Jefferson once wrote to Madison, May 1812: "It enlarges the sphere of choice by adding to it a strong federalist.”

as relief to the finances, and it is not stretching conjecture too far, to say, that Hamilton, could he then have been made to speak, through a spiritual medium, would have exclaimed: You have, after all your opposition, adopted my

ideas!

Madison lived long enough (he died June 28, 1836) to learn how different he stood before posterity, than he did before his contemporaries. Jackson's administrations had redrawn the party lines pretty much as they used to be run against John Adams and during the first ten years of this century. They certainly did not please Madison, as Jackson run them, except his opposition to nullification. Had he (Madison) forgotten the old doctrines? Had he changed? Was there another people or another Constitution? No! Madison was the same, his perceptions had only become clearer, and he saw that extreme party views were never correct, and that great public necessities have to override them. He remembered what Jefferson had written to him when about to assume the Presidency-March 17, 1809: "I know no government, which would be so embarrassing in war as ours. This would proceed very much from the lying and licentious character of our papers; but much, also, from the wonderful credulity of the members of Congress in the floating lies of the day. And in this no experience seems to correct them." He could still affirm these words in 1832-36; and was, no doubt, glad that since 1817 he stood free from the source of these lies and these credulities, party trammels. He had to experience that party interests were the bad impregnations of American politics, and that they prevailed against his best advice. How strange he must have felt in the new atmosphere! After Jefferson and Adams had died, July 4, 1826, and Monroe on the same day in 1831, and Marshall, July 6, 1834, he had no one to commune with, that could like himself have recalled from their own memory, as a participant, the Revolution, the Convention of 1787, the Resolutions of '98, the campaign of 1800, Aaron Burr's revolt, the war of 1812, and the new ambitions of Clay, Calhoun, De Witt Clinton, and Webster; and, later, those of Van Buren, Harrison, Cass, &c. He has, so far as we know, taken his final judgment to his grave, but a friend suggests, that had he spoken, he would have said: "Two things are difficult in America-first: to be true to the country, and yet be the leader of a party; second: for the people to understand a public man, who, to do his country any good at all, has to work with a party and yet avoid its extremists." We accept this as a fair deduction from Madison's life.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE EQUIVOCAL period and its men.

"A people either elated by pride or soured by discontent, are seldom qualified to form a just estimate of the situation."-Gibbon.

THE use and abuse of parties has been fully, perhaps overfully, discussed in these pages; and the blame, for their erection in the Government of the United States, has been ascribed to the defective (really senseless) transfer of British political habits to our politics. We have also seen how these first parties were dying out; the one in consequence of the death of Hamilton, the other because Jefferson and Madison, as well as Monroe, were at heart ashamed of the partisan spirit, whose leaders they were. Jefferson had, in fact, given the watchword for allaying it by his remark: "We are all republicans; we are all federalists;" to which a wit had replied, that it would have been truer to have said: "None of us are really republicans or federalists." Be this as it may, one thing was certain, that party divisions had become almost obliterated by 1820, and that they would have disappeared by 1824, if the people had been up to the situation, and had understood and carried out the main duty of popular rule, that of neither tempting nor suppressing, but curbing personal ambition.

Whether pride or discontent made the people put a false estimate on the actual situation, we need not stop to inquire; we may assume, that both distempers prevailed, and both without real cause-pride, however, most. The financial and moneyed disorders consequent on the wrong fiscal conduct of the war of 1812, were by that time more than overbalanced by the general prosperity enjoyed by society. It was much beyond the industry, skill, and economy of the population. This prosperity made the people unduly proud, though the pecuniary difficulties did not justify the discontent that existed; for they could easily have been rectified. Under these circumstances there were all kinds of temptations for the small