the presence of democracy among them. He had
even added that he hoped the country would never pass ten years without
a rebellion of some sort. In the present case he had the additional
motives for sympathy that he himself disapproved of the law against
which Pennsylvania was in revolt, and detested its author. Washington
could not be expected to take the same view. He was not anti-democratic
like Hamilton; he sincerely held the theory of the State set forth in
the Declaration of Independence. But he was something of an aristocrat,
and very much of a soldier. As an aristocrat he was perhaps touched with
the illusion which was so fatal to his friend Lafayette, the illusion
that privilege can be abolished and yet the once privileged class
partially retain its ascendancy by a sort of tacit acknowledgment by
others of its value. As a soldier he disliked disorder and believed in
discipline. As a commander in the war he had not spared the rod, and had
even complained of Congress for mitigating the severity of military
punishments. It may be that the "Whiskey Insurrection," which he
suppressed with prompt and drastic energy, led him for the first time to
lean a little to the Hamiltonian side. At any rate he was induced,
though reluctantly and only under strong pressure, to introduce into a
Message to Congress a passage reflecting on the Democratic Societies
which were springing up everywhere and gaining daily in power; and in
return found himself attacked, sometimes with scurrility, in the more
violent organs of the Democracy.

Washington's personal ascendancy was, however, sufficient to prevent the
storm from breaking while he was President. It was reserved for his
successor. In 1797 his second term expired. He had refused a third,
thereby setting an important precedent which every subsequent President
has followed, and bade farewell to politics in an address which is among
the great historical documents of the Republic. The two points
especially emphasized were long the acknowledged keynotes of American
policy: the avoidance at home of "sectional" parties--that is, of
parties following geographical lines--and abroad the maintenance of a
strict independence of European entanglements and alliances.

Had a Presidential election then been what it became later, a direct
appeal to the popular vote, it is probable that Jefferson would have
been the second President of the United States. But the Electoral
College was still a realit