war, which has been foolishly called the second
war of independence, came four months afterward. Never was a peace so
welcome as this was on all sides. England was exhausted with the long
contest with Napoleon; and now, that being over, as there was no
practical question to differ about with the United States, the ministry
were not unwilling to listen to the demands of the commercial and
manufacturing classes. In America so great was the universal joy that
the Federalists and the Democrats forgot their differences and their
hates, and wept and laughed by turns in each other's arms and kissed
each other like women. One party was delivered from calamities for
which, if continued much longer, there seemed only one desperate and
dreaded remedy; the other was overjoyed to back out of a blunder which
was the straight and broad road to national ruin. Of all men, Mr.
Madison had the most reason to be glad for a safe deliverance from the
consequences of his own want of foresight and want of firmness. Less
than two years remained to him of his public career. In that brief
period much was forgotten and more forgiven--as our national way is--in
the promise of a great prosperity to be speedily achieved in the
released energies of a vigorous and industrious people. He had not again
to choose between differing factions of his own party, nor to carry out
a policy against the will of a formidable opposition. To the Federalists
hardly a name was left in the progress of events at home and abroad;
while all immediate vital questions of difference vanished, the party in
power remained in almost undisputed ascendency. The most important
Democratic measures it then insisted upon were a national bank and a
protective tariff. To the establishment of a bank Mr. Madison assented
against his own conviction that any provision could be found for it in
the Constitution; and a tariff, both for revenue and for the protection
and encouragement of American industry, he agreed with his party was the
true policy.

For nearly twenty years after his retirement to Montpellier--a name
which, with rare exceptions, he always spelled correctly, and not in the
American way--it was his privilege to live a watchful observer of the
prosperity of his country. If it ever occurred to him in his secret soul
that at the period of his preeminence he had done anything to arrest
that prosperity, he gave no sign. He loved rather to remember and
sometimes to recall to others t