granted; the state government, before exercising a power, has only to inquire whether it has been forbidden.

The state governments have a character of their own, as republican, democratic, aristocratic, free states or slave states; the general government has no character of its own, and takes whatever character it has from the states creating it. It is not necessarily democratic or aristocratic, in favor of popular freedom or opposed to it. True, congress is bound to guaranty to each state a republican constitution; but whether the guaranty is to the Union that each state shall be republican, or a guaranty of the Union to each state of a republican constitution, if such be its choice, may perhaps be a question. If the latter interpretation be admissible, the states may, if they choose, adopt the monarchical form of government, and the Union be thus a union of monarchical instead of simple republican states, without any change in its own character or constitution. But if this interpretation, as generally held, and most likely correctly held, be inadmissible, and it is obligatory on every state to adopt and maintain the republican form of government, still no state is bound to adopt a democratic constitution. A republican government does by no means necessarily imply a democratic government. Rome was a republic, but it was never a democracy; Venice was a republic, but it was an aristocracy, nearly, if not quite, an oligarchy; Switzerland and Holland were both republics at the time of our revolution, but neither showed any inclination to a democracy. France, while we are writing, is a republic, but the whole. positive power of the nation is vested in the prince-president, and the people have, even with universal suffrage, only a qualified negative on the acts of government, similar in its nature, though not in its form, to the tribunitial veto under the republican constitution of ancient Rome. According to the usage of writers on government at the time. the federal constitution was framed and adopted, a republican government is any government without a king or emperor. Under any interpretation of the constitution, then, the states have reserved to themselves the right to adopt any form of government not monarchical. They may vest the whole power of the state in an hereditary aristocracy, in the class of rich men, of poor men, in two or more classes combined, or governing as separate estates, or they may vest it in the whole people, whether noble or ignoble, learned or unlearned, rich or poor, and whichever they do the gov

and in his private correspondence at home and abroad denounced the administration in no measured terms, hardly sparing, if indeed he did spare, the father of his country himself. The opposition to the constitution had pretty much disappeared; several amendments had been proposed and adopted, which removed the principal objections of Mr. Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists; but opposition to the administration took the place of opposition to the constitution, and in 1798, after the election of Mr. Adams instead of Mr. Jefferson to the presidency, it became formidable. This opposition, organized under Mr. Jefferson's lead, took the name of Republican, a name that belongs, and under our system can properly belong, to no party in relation to the Union. The name was insidiously chosen, with the usual disingenuousness of party, and designed to imply, not only that the party bearing it were in favor of the republican form of government, which would have been well enough, but that the Federalists, their opponents, were anti-republican, and in favor of monarchy. Here was gross injustice. Mr. Jefferson and his party were undoubtedly republicans, if not democrats; but so also were the Federalists. There never has been a monarchical party in this country. The people, indeed, did not make the revolution and achieve national independence because opposed to monarchy, or for the purpose of establishing a republic; but they were, and from the first had been, republican. Even the loyalists of the revolution adhered to the mother country from loyalty, interest, habit, association, hopes or fears, not because they were attached to monarchy and opposed to republican government; at least this was true of the great majority of them. Individuals in the Federalist party may have held that a limited monarchy, like that of Great Britain, where practicable, is preferable to a republic, but none of them ever believed such a government to be practicable in the United States. Such was confessedly the case with Mr. Alexander Hamilton; but even he, as Mr. Jefferson himself acknowledges, held that a monarchy was wholly impracticable here, and that it would be the height of folly to attempt to introduce it. George Washington, John Adams, and some other eminent patriots and statesmen, no doubt, agreed with him in his monarchical preferences, but they were as firmly resolved to sustain the republic, and as ready to oppose every attempt to introduce monarchical institutions, as were Mr. Jefferson and his partisans themselves.

Individuals, also, there may be now, and not a few too, who, when suffering some pique from the democracy, or alarmed at the mad policy of our radicals, fancy themselves to be in favor of monarchy; but there is not and never has been any monarchical party in the country, and never have our politics turned in any sense whatever on the questions between monarchy and republicanism.

Mr. Jefferson and his party, however, saw proper to accuse the old Federalists of being anti-republican, and of aiming at the establishment of monarchy. They succeeded but too well in making a large portion of the American people believe it, and the prejudices they created still linger in the minds of not a few of our citizens. He who should pronounce himself in favor of the old Federalists would stand a very good chance of being termed by the infallible American press a monarchist, and, as such, of being held up to public indignation. Yet the accusation was false, and known by Mr. Jefferson, as well as others, to be false. He himself confesses it, and says in his first inaugural address: "We have called brethren of the same faith by different names. We are all federalists; we are all republicans." Wherefore, then, had he charged his opponents with being monarchists? It was party injustice, and has to be put down to the unscrupulousness of party spirit, from which Mr. Jefferson, we are sorry to say, was not himself entirely free. Both parties, then, agreed as to their general principles of government. Both were republican, both held, after the fashion of the times, the origin of government in compact, in a real or imaginary popular convention, and both asserted the sovereignty of the people. Both, also, agreed, that the Union, instead of a mere confederation, of the states must be preserved. Wherein, then, did they differ?

This question requires a twofold answer; first, in relation to the general government, and second, in relation to the state governments, or government in general. In relation to the general government, the Federalists wished to consolidate its powers, and to give it as much the character of a supreme central government as could be done without transcending its constitutional limits. Their tendency was to develop and confirm the powers of the Union, rather than the reserved rights of the states. Their policy was to render the government strong and efficient at home, and respectable abroad; to protect commerce and navigation, to found a navy and to maintain an army to prevent national

insults, and to protect our maritime and national rights. These were, in brief, the principles and policy of the Fed.eralists. The Republicans were more intent on the reserved rights of the states than on the powers granted to the Union, were opposed to making the federal government a strong government, and in favor of restricting its sphere, and diminishing the patronage of the executive, as far as possible under the constitution. They clamored for "retrenchment and economy," opposed the accumulation of a national debt, the general fundholding system, the creation of a navy, the maintenance of an army, and the protection of commerce and navigation, otherwise than by diplomacy and bargain. They were in favor of leaving our commerce to foreigners, to be carried on in foreign vessels, and of pocketing national insults, instead of going to the expense of guarding against them or of redressing them. Mr. Jefferson had no very lively sensibility to national honor, and lived in mortal dread of war and national expenditures. If he had been a son of the cold, calculating North, instead of the warm, chivalric South, of Massachusetts instead of Virginia, it is probable we should never have heard the last of his tameness, his meanness of spirit, and his fear of expense; and certain it is, that we owe to him and his party much of that low national character which we still bear abroad, that common belief among foreigners that an American will do any thing and put up with any thing for money. Another war with Great Britain, perhaps, is needed to enable us to retrieve our character, and prove that there is something that Yankees prize more than money.

The natural tendency of the Republican party, pushed to its extreme, would have too much restricted the powers of the general government, made the Union a mere rope of sand, and thrown the country back into that chaotic state from which the constitution had rescued it. Its policy would, if carried out, have rendered the government inefficient at home and contemptible abroad, exposed our trade, our maritime and national rights, to perpetual insult and injury, and prevented us from ever becoming a great commercial and manufacturing people. It was, therefore, a policy which, with such a bold and enterprising people, and in a country of such rich and varied natural resources as ours, could by no human possibility be practicable, except for a very brief period. The tendency of the Federalists, if

pushed to its extreme, might have swallowed up the states in the Union, and deprived us of the advantages of that federative element so essential in our system of government. But the general policy of the party was unobjectionable, and has, with the exception of one or two particulars, been adopted to the letter by the Republican party, and become the settled policy of the country. There was, however, never much danger of the centralizing tendency of the Federalists being pushed to an extreme, and we have been unable to find an instance in which the party while in power transcended its constitutional limits or usurped for the Union any of the reserved rights of the states. The Republican party, after all, was, when in power, more of a state-rights party in profession than in practice. The Federalists may have had the stronger tendency to centralization through the legislative and judicial departments of the government; but the Republicans had much the stronger tendency to it through the executive department; which shows that the Republicans were far more likely to develop into monarchists than were the Federalists whom they charged with being in favor of monarchy. No Federalist ever grasped more power for the Union than did Mr. Jefferson in his purchase of Louisiana, and his Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts. No Federalist document was ever issued containing stronger centralizing doctrines than those set forth in General Jackson's famous proclamation against the southern nullifiers, while, on the other hand, the Federalists in the Hartford convention pushed the state-rights doctrines to the very verge of nullification. In fact, either party, when in power, tended to magnify the powers of the Union, and widen the sphere of the general government as much as possible, while either, in opposition, fell back more or less on the reserved rights of the states.

In regard to those principles of government which find their application with us only within the sphere of the state governments, there were also important differences, as well as resemblances. Both, as we have said, were republican, both asserted the sovereignty of the people, and the origin of government in convention; but the Federalists inclined to a republic of the respectabilities, and the Republicans to a democracy. The difference between the two parties was analogous to that between the Girondins and the Mountain. or Jacobins in France. Both agreed in rejecting monarchy and decapitating the king; but the Girondins were for re