Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1 (wikilinked).djvu/117

106 working for his American language and literature because of the triumph of Jeffersonian principles elsewhere; Barlow became more American when his friends gained power; the work of the colleges went unbroken; but prejudices, habits, theories, and laws remained what they had been in the past, and in Connecticut the influence of nationality was less active than ten, twenty, or even thirty years before. Yale College was but a reproduction of Harvard with stricter orthodoxy, turning out every year about thirty graduates, of whom nearly one fourth went into the Church. For the last ten years the number tended rather to diminish than to increase.

Evidently an intellectual condition like that of New England could not long continue. The thoughts and methods of the eighteenth century held possession of men's minds only because the movement of society was delayed by political passions. Massachusetts, and especially Boston, already contained a younger generation eager to strike into new paths, while forcibly held in the old ones. The more decidedly the college graduates of 1800 disliked democracy and its habits of thought, the more certain they were to com­pensate for political narrowness by freedom in fields not political. The future direction of the New Eng­land intellect seemed already suggested by the im­possibility of going further in the line of President Dwight and Fisher Ames. Met by a barren negation on that side, thought was driven to some new chan­nel; and the United States were the more concerned