of the people in a sufficient degree to enable them really to govern the country. We complain not of this. We complain not that the Federalists were defeated in 1801. We are not sure that the reëlection of the elder Adams would have been for the best interests of the country. It is possible, and we think not improbable, that the Federalists were pushing their tendency to a strong government too far, and that, if they had succeeded in their efforts to retain power, they would have thrown too much power into the federal government, and destroyed the nicely adjusted balance between it and the several state governments. All we mean to say is, that their defeat was not an unmixed good, and that the joy felt at the triumph of their opponents should be mingled with regrets; for if by that triumph some evil was prevented, some good was lost. The Federalists had errors from which the Republicans were free, but they had certain tendencies and principles which the Republicans want. We think, the danger, if danger there really was, having now passed away, it is time for the Republican party to do justice to the Federalists, and to profit by liberal loans from their principles and policy. Our motive for calling attention to them is not to displace the Democratic party, but to induce it to correct its own exclusive tendencies by the sound principles which they held. All parties are more or less exclusive, and none of them embrace the truth under all its phases. Each has its dominant idea, true enough if you will, but incomplete and dangerous if taken alone, and pushed to its last consequences. The true and accomplished statesman is an eclectic, and above all parties, and never the slave of any, because all wise and wholesome civil government is founded on compromises, or in the nice adjustment of mutually opposing principles.

The great danger against which every real statesman has to be on his guard is that of leaving the practical for the theoretical or speculative. In teaching, we are always to aim at first principles, and to push our principles to their last consequences. Theoretical truth knows no just medium, no compromises, because all truth is homogeneous and one, and what is not truth is falsehood. Here we must seek logical unity and consistency. But in government, which is a practical affair, we have to distrust strict logical unity and consistency, because they invariably lead to despotism. Every simple government is despotic. Hence, your European republicans, who adopt the simple democratic idea,

and seek to conform the whole political and social order to it, always establish, as far as they establish any thing, not liberty, but social despotism, the most intolerable of all despotisms. The gravest error of Mr. Jeferson and his party was in their tendency to render the democratic idea exclusive. Mr. Jefferson was a great man, but he was a philosopher after the manner of the eighteenth century, and, though a brilliant theorist, was not a statesman in the highest sense of that word. A statesman is not merely one who knows the various theories of government, and is able to select one of them and give it a scientific exposition, but one who comprehends the genius of his countrymen, and knows how to adapt the government to them so as in its practical workings to secure the public good.

Mr. Jefferson, like the philosophers of his time, made no account of the genius of a people, but looked upon them as wax, which takes readily any impression that it is thought best to give it. He overrated the powers of government in the formation of national character, and believed it quite possible to form the American people to the ideal model framed by the infidel philosophers of France, and to change them from an English to a continental people. He hated Great Britain, and adored infidel France, for France in his day was regarded as infidel, and he wished to make us substantially Frenchmen, after the pattern of the revolutionists. In this he proved his want of statesmanship. We are no worshippers of the English social system, and, as distinguished from the political system, we think it far inferior to that of most continental states. Great Britain is the richest country in the world, and she stands undeniably at the head of the modern industrial system, but in no continental state can you find that social degradation and that squalid misery that appall you in her larger towns. But the statesman must take as his point of departure the social system he finds existing, whatever its merit compared with that of other states, for the life of every people is indissolubly connected with their social system. Destroy that, and you destroy them. You may develop, modify, improve it, but you must always preserve its essential character, and proceed according to its essential principles.

say

We do the memory of Jefferson no injustice when we he overlooked this important fact. He was a materialist, and ignorant of Christian philosophy. He knew not that in nations, as in individuals, there is something substan-

tial, persisting, and unmalleable, mightier than the mightiest despots, and against which the best-devised theories are sure to break. You cannot alter this essential genius of a people without destroying it. We were essentially an English people, living essentially an English life. We had grown up under and with the English social system. Whether the Federalists understood this in theory better than Mr. Jefferson and his friends, may be a question, but they certainly understood it better in practice. They adhered more closely to the English model, and wished, in their interpretation of our institutions and the administration of the government, to depart as little from the English type as possible. They were therefore, in our judgment, the truer statesmen. They sought not to change the social system or the genius of the American people, but to conform to it, and to make the best of it. They indulged no dreams of ideal perfection, imagined no Utopia, and were content to draw from fact and experience. They were as strongly republican or anti-monarchical as their opponents, even more so; but they were less democratic, they were more English and less French, more American and less foreign, more practical and less speculative, more disposed to be satisfied with the existing order, and less disposed to try new experiments.

The American genius is republican as opposed to monarchy, but it is not democratic. Democracy as an exclusive element is in American society an exotic, imported originally frem the philosophers and speculators of continental Europe. The American people did not throw off their allegiance to the British crown because they wanted to establish a democracy, or because they wanted to get rid of monarchy, but they did it because they wanted national independence. With all the talk to-day about democracy, the American people at bottom remain as they were under Washington and Adams. Democracy is a speculation with them, not a life. At bottom, in their interior political life, they are, as we have so often contended, constitutionalists, and cling to Magna Charta. A struggle is no doubt going on in our country between the constitutional order, inherited from our British ancestors, and the democratic order, imported by the Anti-federalists from France, and reinforced by the foreign radicals naturalized or resident amongst us, and on the result of this struggle depends the life of the American people. If the efforts

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made to conform our life to the foreign democratic theory succeed, the United States of Washington and Adams, the "Model Republic," is no more, whatever may take its place, whether anarchy or despotism.

Whether the democratic order be the best of all possible orders or not, this much is certain, it is not the American system, and whoever labors to introduce it, or to secure its triumph, labors to destroy the very life of the American people. As yet, democracy is with us only a theory, a false interpretation of our system. We are more American in our practice than in our doctrines, and act far better than we speculate. But how long this will continue to be the case it is not easy to say. The manifest discrepancy between our speculative theory and our interior habits, instincts, and inherited constitutionalism, is certainly fraught with danger, and if we do not before a great while conform our theory to our political and social system, we may be sure that, with the influence of unprincipled demagogues, aided by the mass of foreign radicals pouring into our larger towns and cities, and who, as we have elsewhere shown, confound republicanism with democracy, we shall conform our practice to our theory, and not so much change as utterly destroy American life.

Names have great influence. "It is very unfortunate," said one evening to us, in a long conversation on this subject, the great southern statesman, Mr. Calhoun, "that the Republican party calls itself democratic." That party does and will rule the country, for, as a party, it is the most truly national party now in existence. The Federal party has long since ceased to exist; the Whig party numbers a great many excellent individuals in its ranks, who have correct views of government, but they do not determine the policy or the action of their party. As a party, it has no principles, no definite policy, and seeks success by courting almost any and every temporary or local excitement, which is undoubtedly a proof that it is weak, and feels itself weak. In former times it did good service to the country as a check on the excesses of the dominant party; but since 1838, when the Boston Atlas denounced the "Aristocratic Whigs," claimed the name of Democrat for the Whig party, and recommended its party to descend into the forum and to take the people by the hand, it has attempted to outbid the Democratic party, and has served only to push the country into a wilder and more excessive democracy.

It may have some local and temporary successes, but, as we have said, when it attains to place, it possesses in too feeble a degree the confidence of the people to be able to govern. As a general rule, the government of the country will remain in the hands of the Democratic party. We do not complain of this, for it is not that party we are opposing in what we call democracy, as so many fools imagine, and so many knaves pretend. That party, though from the first inclining too much to the democracy of the European school, is not, properly speaking, democratic, and ought not to call itself by that name. The fact that it has so called itself does harm, for we cannot bring out and insist on American constitutionalism, in opposition to exclusive democracy, without seeming to many to be making war on that party itself, and not without being represented as doing it by a much larger number. If we warn the country against the dangers of democracy, a hue and cry is raised against us, as if we wished to displace the party in power, and put in some other party. Such, however, is by no means our wish. What we want is, not to turn out the Democratic party, or to throw any obstacle in the way of. its success, for, faulty as it is, we prefer it as a national party to any other organized party in the country; but we do wish to impress upon that party itself certain wholesome lessons, lessons which it would readily accept if it had adhered to its old name of Republican, and had not suffered itself to consecrate by its new name certain unAmerican speculations. The safety of the country requires it to develop and render more prominent its conservative elements, and to restrain within more moderate limits its ultra-democratic or radical tendencies.

Unquestionably in a country like ours popular sentiment will in the long run have its way, but men who really love their country will take as much pains to form a wise and just popular sentiment as they will to ascertain and follow the popular sentiment for the time. The will of the people constitutionally expressed is law for us in all civil matters, but it does not follow from that that the will of the people is always just, or that popular sentiment is infallible. The statesman, if worthy of the name, has something more to do than to ascertain the wishes of his constituents and to conform to them. He is bound, indeed, to consult those wishes, but he is bound also to go back of them, and to ascertain whether they are wise and just; for there is for