Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/300

 property, culture, and social position is inevitable. Political equality follows naturally. Democracy is given in the circumstances of the case. The yeoman farmer is the prevailing type of the population. It is only when the pressure of population and the development of a more complex social organization produce actual inequality in the circumstances of individuals, that a political aristocracy can follow and grow upon a social aristocracy. The United States are far from having reached any such state as yet. These facts were felt, if not distinctly analyzed and perceived, even by those who might on theory have preferred monarchical institutions; and, as Washington said, there were not ten men in the country who wanted a monarchy.

The Federalists repaid their opponents with a no less exaggerated fear of their principles and intentions, regarding them as Jacobins and sans culottes, who desired to destroy whatever was good and to produce bloodshed and anarchy. Party spirit ran to heights seldom reached since. Partisan abuse outstripped anything since. It was an additional misfortune that the questions at issue were delicate questions of foreign policy and international law. It is a great evil in a republic that parties should divide by sympathy with two foreign nations, and it is the greatest evil possible that they should not believe in each other's loyalty to the existing constitution.

The deeper movement which was stirring to affect the general attitude or standpoint from which the Constitution was viewed (a matter, of course, of the first importance under a written constitution), and which was changing the constitutional republic into a democratic republic, did not escape the observation of the most sagacious men of the earliest days. Fisher Ames wrote to Wolcott in 1800: "The fact really is, that over and above the difficulties of sustaining a free government, and the freer the more