Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/299

 sovereign majority to rule, the duty of passive obedience in the minority, and that the majority can do no wrong.

Opposition to the Federal Constitution died out in a year or two, and no one could be found who would confess that he had resisted its adoption. Parties divided on questions of detail and of interpretation, and the points on which they differed were those by which the Constitution imposed delays and restraints upon the popular will. The administrations of Washington and Adams threw continually increasing weight in favor of constitutional guarantees, as the history of the French Revolution seemed to the Federalists to furnish more and more convincing proofs of the dangers of unbridled democracy. The opposition saw nothing in that history save the extravagant ebullitions of a people new to freedom — saw rather examples to be imitated than dangers to be shunned. Sympathy and gratitude came in to exercise a weighty influence on political issues. The personal executive and the judiciary were the chief subjects of dislike, and General Washington himself finally incurred abuse more wanton and severe than any President since, except the elder Adams, has endured, because the fact was recognized that Washington's personality was the strongest bulwark which the system possessed at the outset.

Democracy, however, was, and still is, so deeply rooted in the physical and economic circumstances of the United States, that the constitutional barriers set up against it have proved feeble and vain. Fears of monarchy have now almost ceased or are ridiculed. Monarchist and aristocrat are now used only as epithets to put down some over-bold critic of our political system; but in the early days of the Republic the mass of the people believed that the supporters of the first two administrations desired aristocracy and monarchy. In a new country, however, with unlimited land, the substantial equality of the people in