Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1.djvu/333

320 it can be done, and I own that the day which should convince me to the contrary would be the bitterest of my life."

This motive, he said, had dictated his answer to the New Haven remonstrants,—a paper, he added, which "will furnish new texts for the monarchists; but from them I ask nothing: I wish nothing but their eternal hatred."

The interest of Jefferson's character consisted, to no small extent, in these outbursts of temper, which gave so lively a tone to his official, and still more to his private, language. The avowal in one sentence of his duty as a patriot to restore the harmony which his predcessors (one of whom was President Washington) had "so wickedly made it their object to break up," and the admission that the day of his final failure would be the bitterest of his life, contrasted strangely with his wish, in the next sentence, for the eternal hatred of a class which embraced most of the bench and bar, the merchants and farmers, the colleges and the churches of New England! In any other man such contradictions would have argued dishonesty. In Jefferson they proved only that he took New England to be like Virginia,—ruled by a petty oligarchy which had no sympathies with the people, and whose artificial power, once broken, would vanish like that of the Virginia church. He persuaded himself that if his system were politically successful, the New England hierarchy could be safely ignored. When he said