nd the insolent pretensions of the European belligerents,
were the central points of two distinct influences which bore strongly
on the development of the United States.

The dominant party, the republicans, had a horror of a national debt
which almost amounted to a mania. The associations of the term, derived
from their reading of English history, all pointed to a condition of
affairs in which the rise of a strong aristocracy was inevitable; and,
to avoid the latter, they were determined to pay off the former. The
payment for Louisiana precluded, in their opinion, the support of a
respectable navy; and the remnants of colonialism in their party
predisposed them to adopt an ostrich policy instead. The Embargo act was
passed in 1807, forbidding all foreign commerce. The evident failure of
this act to influence the belligerents brought about its repeal in 1809,
and the substitution of the Non-intercourse act. This prohibited
commercial intercourse with England and France until either should
revoke its injurious edicts. Napoleon, by an empty and spurious
revocation in 1810, induced Congress to withdraw the act in respect to
France, keeping it alive in respect to England. England refused to admit
the sincerity of the French revocation, to withdraw her Orders in
Council, or to cease impressing American seamen. The choice left to the
United States was between war and submission.

The federalist leaders saw that, while their party strength was confined
to a continually decreasing territory, the opposing democracy not only
had gained the mass of the original United States, but was swarming
toward and beyond the Mississippi. They dropped to the level of a mere
party of opposition; they went further until the only article of their
political creed was State sovereignty; some of them went one step
further, and dabbled in hopeless projects for secession and the formation
of a New England republic of five States. It is difficult to perceive
any advantage to public affairs in the closing years of the federal
party, except that, by impelling the democratic leaders to really
national acts and sympathies, it unwittingly aided in the development of
nationality from democracy.

If the essential characteristic of colonialism is the sense of
dependence and the desire to imitate, democracy, at least in its earlier
phases, begets the opposite qualities. The Congressional elections of
1810-11 showed that the people had gone further in democra