Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/189

178 seldom see anything to admire in the ignorance and brutality of frontiersmen, and should declare that vir­tue and wisdom no longer guided the United States! What they saw was not encouraging. To a new so­ciety, ignorant and semi-barbarous, a mass of dema­gogues insisted on applying every stimulant that could inflame its worst appetites, while at the same instant taking away every influence that had hitherto helped to restrain its passions. Greed for wealth, lust for power, yearning for the blank void of savage free­dom such as Indians and wolves delighted in,—these were the fires that flamed under the caldron of Amer­ican society, in which, as conservatives believed, the old, well-proven, conservative crust of religion, gov­ernment, family, and even common respect for age, education, and experience was rapidly melting away, and was indeed already broken into fragments, swept about by the seething mass of scum ever rising in greater quantities to the surface.

Against this Federalist and conservative view of democratic tendencies, democrats protested in a thousand forms, but never in any mode of expression which satisfied them all, or explained their whole character. Probably Jefferson came nearest to the mark, for he represented the hopes of science as well as the prejudices of Virginia; but Jefferson's writings may be searched from beginning to end without re­vealing the whole measure of the man, far less of the movement. Here and there in his letters a suggestion was thrown out, as though by chance, revealing larger