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HISTORY 1789-1701] part of it. The first four years of the new system showed that the states had now to deal with a very different power from the impotent Congress of the Confederation. The new power was even able to exert pressure upon the two states which had not ratified the Constitution, though the pressure was made as gentle as possible. As a first step, the higher duties imposed on imports from foreign countries were expressly directed to apply to imports from North Carolina and Rhode Island. North Carolina having called a second convention, her case was left to the course of nature; and the second convention ratified the Constitution (November 21, 1789). The Rhode Island legislature asked that their state might not be considered altogether foreigners, made their duties agree with those of the new government, and reserved the proceeds for “continental” purposes. Still no further steps were taken. A bill was therefore introduced, directing the president to suspend commercial intercourse with Rhode Island, and to demand from her her share of the continental debt. This was passed by the Senate, and waited but two steps further to become law. Newspaper proposals to divide the little state between her two nearest neighbours were stopped by her ratification of the Constitution (May 29, 1790). The “old thirteen” were thus united under

the Constitution; and yet, so strong is the American prejudice for the autonomy of the states that these last two were allowed to enter in the full conviction that they did so in the exercise of sovereign freedom of choice. Their entrance, however, was no more involuntary than that of others. If there had been real freedom of choice, nine states would never have ratified: the votes of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia and New York were only secured by the pressure of powerful minorities in these states, backed by the almost unanimous votes of the others.

113. Protection was begun in the first Tariff Act, whose object, said its preamble, was the protection of domestic manufactures.

The duties, however, ranged only from 7½ to 10%, averaging about 8½%. The system, too, had rather a political than an economic basis. Until 1789 the states had controlled the imposition of duties. The separate state feeling was a factor so strong that secession was a possibility which every statesman had to take into account. Hamilton's object, in introducing the system, seems to have been to create a class of manufacturers, running through all the states, but dependent for prosperity on the new Federal government and its tariff. This would be a force which would make strongly against any attempt at secession, or against the tendency to revert to control by state legislatures, even though it based the national idea on a conscious tendency towards the development of classes. The same feeling seems to have been at the bottom of his establishment of a national bank, his assumption of state debts, and most of the general scheme which his influence forced upon the Federalist party. (See
 * and .)

114. In forming his cabinet Washington had paid attention to the opposing elements which had united for the temporary

purpose of ratifying the Constitution. The national element was represented by Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, and Henry Knox, secretary of war; the particularist element (using the term to indicate support of the states, not of a state) by Jefferson, secretary of state, and Edmund Randolph, attorney-general. At the end of 1792 matters were in train for the general recognition of the existence of two parties, whose struggles were to decide the course of the Constitution's development. The occasion came in the opening of the following year, when the new nation was first brought into contact with the French Revolution.

115. The controlling tendency of Jefferson and his school was to the maintenance of individual rights at the highest possible

point, as the Hamilton school was always ready to assert the national power to restrict individual rights for the general good. Other points of difference are rather symptomatic than essential. The Jefferson school supported the states, in the belief that they were the best bulwarks for individual rights. When the French Revolution began its

usual course in America by agitation for the “rights of man,” it met a sympathetic audience in the Jefferson party and a cold and unsympathetic hearing from the Hamilton school of Federalists. The latter were far more interested in securing the full recognition of the power and rights of the nation than in securing the individual against imaginary dangers, as they thought them. For ten years the surface marks of distinction between the two parties were to be connected with the course of events in Europe; but the essence of distinction was not in the surface marks.

116. The new government was not yet four years old; it was not familiar, nor of assured permanency. The only national

governments of which Americans had had previous experience were the British government and the Confederation: in the former they had had no share, and the latter had had no power. The only places in which they had had long-continued, full, and familiar experience of self-government were their state governments: these were the only governmental forms which were then distinctly associated in their minds with the general notion of republican government. The governing principle of the Hamilton school, that the construction or interpretation of the terms of the Constitution was to be such as to broaden the powers of the Federal government, necessarily involved a corresponding trenching on the powers of the states. It was natural, then, that the Jefferson school should look on every feature of the Hamilton programme as “anti-republican,” meaning, probably, at first no more than opposed to the state system, though the term soon came to imply something of monarchical and, more particularly, of English tendencies. The disposition of the Jefferson school to claim for themselves a certain peculiar title to the position of “republicans” developed into the appearance of the first Republican, or the Democratic-Republican, party, about 1793.

117. Many of the Federalists were shrewd and active business men, who naturally took prompt advantage of the opportunities

which the new system offered. The Republicans therefore believed and asserted that the whole Hamilton programme was dictated by selfish or class interest; and they added this to the accusation of monarchical tendencies. These charges, with the fundamental differences of mental constitution, exasperated by the passion which differences as to the French Revolution seemed to carry with them everywhere, made the political history of this decade a very unpleasant record. The provision for establishing the national capital on the Potomac (1790) was declared to have been carried by a corrupt bargain; and accusations of corruption were renewed at

every opportunity. In 1793 a French agent, Edmond Charles Edouard Genet (1765-1834), appeared to claim the assistance of the United States for the French republic, and went to the length of commissioning privateers and endeavouring to secure recruits, especially for a force which he expected to raise for the conquest of Louisiana from Spain. Washington decided to issue a proclamation of neutrality, the first act of the kind in American history. It was the first indication, also, of the policy which has made the course of every president, with the exception of Polk, a determined leaning to peace, even when the other branches of the government have been intent on war. Genet, however, continued his activities, and made

outrageous demands upon the government, so that finally Washington demanded and secured (1794) his recall. The proclamation of 1793 brought about the first distinctly party feeling; and it was intensified by Washington's charge that popular opposition in western Pennsylvania (1794) to the new

excise law (see ) had been fomented by the extreme French party. Their name, Democrat, was applied by the Federalists to the whole Republican party as a term of contempt, but it was not accepted by the party for some twenty years; then the compound title “Democratic-Republican” became, as it