olleagues
and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The
courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them,
placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the
wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me.
Politics were the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican
government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not
be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only
advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests
there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative
houses."

It must be remembered that Jefferson's absence in France had been the
period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its
laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the
need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men's minds.
The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was
elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed
in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be
given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question,
and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by
Jefferson on the other, which ended with the election of Jefferson as
President in the year 1800.

Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.(2)
John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of
corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted
that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best
practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not
for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton's notion
was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed
in one or two ways,--by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the
ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of "a
thousand Spanish dollars" as the proper qualification for a voter.

The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises
chiefly from a different belief as to the connection between education and
morality. All aristocratic systems must, in the last analysis, be founded
either upon brute force or else upon the assumption that education and
morality go hand-in-han