n
dragged from his lofty position, for they admired him, and were willing
to acknowledge his services to the country; but that the idea grew
within them that he must be properly checked, lest they suddenly find
themselves subjects again. They realized that they had been running to
him for advice upon every matter, great and insignificant, since the new
Congress began its sittings, and that they had adopted the greater part
of his counsels without question; they believed that Hamilton was
becoming the Congress as he already was the Administration; and
overlooked the fact that legislative authority as against executive had
no such powerful supporter as the Secretary of the Treasury. But it was
not an era when men reasoned as exhaustively as they might have done.
They were terrified by bogies, and the blood rarely was out of their
heads. "Monarchism must be checked," and Hamilton for some months past
had watched the rapid welding of the old anti-Federalists and the timid
Federalists into what was shortly to be known, for a time, as the
Republican party. That Jefferson had been at work all summer, as during
the previous term, with his subtle, insinuating, and convincing pen, he
well knew, and for what the examples of such men as Jefferson and
Madison counted--taking their stand on the high ground of stemming the
menace to personal liberties. The Republican party was to be stronger
far than the old anti-Federal, for it was to be a direct and constant
appeal to the controlling passion of man, vanity; and Hamilton believed
that did it obtain the reins of power too early in the history of the
Nation, confusion, if not anarchy, would result: not only was it too
soon to try new experiments, diametrically opposed to those now in
operation, but, under the tutelage of Jefferson, the party was in favour
of vesting more power in the masses. Hamilton had no belief in
entrusting power to any man or body of men that had not brains,
education, and a developed reasoning capacity. He was a Republican but
not a Democrat. He recognized, long before the rival party saw their
mistake in nomenclature, that this Jefferson school marked the
degeneracy of republicanism into democracy. Knowing how absurd and
unfounded was all the hysterical talk about monarchism, and that time
would vindicate the first Administration and its party as Republican in
its very essence, he watched with deep, and often with impersonal,
uneasiness the growth of a party whic