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fore, in accepting them as positive and enduring elements in the history of our politics down to the civil war, and, adopting them as political creeds, we may observe their influence upon the formation of the two great parties in the United States.

The two ways of regarding the end of government had divided the people themselves, and had rapidly assumed the characters of schools.

One of these schools drew its inspiration from the past and rested upon experience. It took the position that political history showed, that the conflict between good and evil in man had been an unceasing one, and that government should recognize it by maintaining from the beginning strength sufficient to overcome the evil; but, inasmuch as this had never yet been thoroughly accomplished, that the evil in man should be so far recognized as to turn it to the advantage of the state. This, they claimed, had been reached by the British system more nearly than by any other government since the days of the Athenian democracy or those of the Roman Republic. The men of this school took the world as they found it; and they pointed to the experience of the British empire, wherein the corruptions of Walpole and his successors had enured more to political stability than had the experiments in constitution-making of the Commonwealth; experiments which had been rejected finally by the British people in favor of the old system with limitations. Therefore, they would confine themselves to tried principles and ancient forms, and would retain the British system, but would have it purged of its corruption and divested of the characteristics and methods which were incompatible with a republic and a federation,

and would adapt it to the novel conditions existing in a new country.

Such was the view taken by the Old School: it was the school of experience, of conservatism, of aversion to change, of timidity, and of content.

The New School looked to the future for its inspiration, and placed its hopes upon experiment. It caught at the recognition by the Old School of evil as a governmental force, and insisted that in politics fear of evil had always supplanted faith in goodness, and that, in consequence, the past and the present political systems of the world had not been founded upon the strength but upon the weakness of man and his assumed incapacity to govern himself, and, hence, that each and every government had for its controlling motive the necessity of a ruler. This school rejected the doctrine of original sin, and reversed the ancient political creed: it would have for the corner-stone of the new fabric avowed faith in the capacity of man to govern himself, and, presuming that man was more good than bad, and that the development of the good was tantamount to the suppression of evil, it would have the administration of the government act upon the assumption that men were strong and capable. This school extirpated the "ruler" from government ; it maintained that government was not a science susceptible neither to new ideas nor to further development, and pigeon-holed as complete, but that the history of the colonies themselves proved that no science had been more generative of new ideas or more productive of new forms. It pointed to the self-government with local representation which Virginia had acquired within twelve years of its foundation; to the

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representative democracy and written constitution of Connecticut; to the toleration of Maryland and Pennsylvania; to the freedom of conscience and of speech in Rhode Island; and to the reservation of power in the people of New Jersey. All of these innovations, it asserted, had been constituted elements of government; all had been adopted on the assumption that what was good in man was superior as a governmental force to the evil that was in him, and that men were capable of governing themselves, and that all these instances had justified this assumption by their long and sorely-tried experience.

This school asserted, further, that this rich growth of political principles and of governmental forms was due to the fact that the predilection of the colonist for self-government had been unrepressed by the remote principles and forces of Europe; that, left to itself, its expansion had been natural and healthy, and that, the same conditions still existing, new developments would continue to appear. If these things had been done in the green tree, what would be done in the dry? Men of this way of thinking remembered that Oxenstiern had told his son that the world was governed too much, and they were determined that self-government itself should not govern too much. They had seen the colonies rebel, form states, combine and carry to a successful termination a prolonged defence against the greatest of earthly powers, and do this without common headship, without common legislation, and without common courts; and thus, from their own experience, they had proof beyond question that, to a free people, neither "a ruler" nor "a strong government" is necessary, and in fact, scarcely any

government. They insisted that the Revolution would prove abortive, were it to stop with a change of forms merely, and without an assertion of the principles acted upon by the colonies, and without a way left open to future development.

It is clear that this school did not reject experience, but that it regarded the experience of its own people as a new dispensation in politics, which it would substitute for the European notions of government henceforth to be discarded. It was radical in its nature; and it was the school of hope, of faith in human nature, of experiment, and of endeavor.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FORMATION OF PARTIES

CONTINUED.

Parties form on Hamilton's measures - Contrary constructions of the Constitution; liberal and strict construction - Madison leads the strict-constructionists in Congress - Personal feeling — Views of Hamilton's financial policy entertained by the Jeffersonians - Hamilton's system favored a plutocracy rather than an aristocracy.

THE inauguration of government under the present Constitution clearly illustrates the normal evolution of parties. So vast was the constructive work to be done that, when Hamilton assumed the Secretaryship of the Treasury, he became, from the force of circumstances, the most important member of the Cabinet. He was, as long as the Secretaryship of the State remained vacant, the head of the administration, and he had the field to himself. Possessed with the notion that the government of the United States, as created, was intended to be supreme in the functions assigned to it, and supreme, too, as a power independent and undelegated, he conceived his first duty to be to invest it as soon as possible with this character. is true that the powers bestowed upon the new gov ernment by the states were few, and that these had been plainly enumerated; but a constitution, from its very nature and for the most sagacious reasons, he conceived to be but a frame of government, a sketch, which legislation and custom are to fill in as circumstances require. The Constitution, therefore,

It