e
cost of these posts, like the cost of traveling, was in many cases
prohibitive. The rate for a letter of a single sheet was twenty-five
cents. News traveled slowly from State to State. The best news sheets
in New York printed intelligence from Virginia which was almost as
belated as that which the packets brought from Europe.

With such barriers in the way of intercourse, the masses, so far indeed
as they possessed the suffrage at all, were not politically
self-assertive. Devoted primarily to the pursuit of agriculture and
commerce, essentially rural in their distribution, the people had
neither the desire nor the means, nor yet the leisure, to engage in
active politics. Politics was the occupation of those who commanded
leisure and some accumulated wealth. The voters of the several States
touched each other only through their leaders. In these early years
national parties were hardly more than divisions of a governing class.
Party organization was visible only in its most rudimentary form--a
leader and a personal following. The machinery of a modern party
organization did not come into existence until the railroad and the
steamboat tightened the bonds of intercourse between State and State,
and between community and community.

In another respect political parties of the Federalist period differed
from later political organizations. Under stress of foreign
complications, Federalists and Republicans were forced into an
irreconcilable antagonism. The one group was thought to be British in
its sympathies, the other Gallic. In the eyes of his opponents, the
Republican was no better than a democrat, a Jacobin, a revolutionary
incendiary; and the Federalist no better than a monocrat and a Tory. The
effect was denationalizing. Each lost confidence in the other's
Americanism.

The Federalists, in control of the Executive,--and thus, in the common
phrase, "in power,"--were disposed to view the opposition as factious,
if not treasonable. Washington deprecated the spirit of party and
thought it ought not to be tolerated in a popular government. Fisher
Ames expressed a common Federalist conviction when he wrote in 1796: "It
is a childish comfort that many enjoy, who say the minority aim at place
only, not at the overthrow of government. They aim at setting mobs above
law, not at the filling places which have known legal responsibility.
The struggle against them is therefore _pro aris et focis_; it is for
our rights and liber