Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/187

168 New York or Pennsylvania; and all that was worth saving might be lost before her democracy would consent to eat the husks of repentance and ask forgiveness from the wise and good. Cabot wanted to wait a few months or years until democracy should work out its own fate; and whenever the public should yearn for repose, America would find her Pitt and Bonaparte combined in the political grasp and military genius of Alexander Hamilton. Pickering, as a practical politician, felt that if democracy were suffered to pull down the hierarchy of New England, neither disunion nor foreign war, nor "a very great calamity" of any kind, could with certainty restore what had once been destroyed.

Cabot's argument shook none of Pickering's convictions; but the practical difficulty on which the home Junto relied was fatal unless some way of removing it could be invented. During the month of February, 1804, when the impeachment panic was at its height in Congress, Pickering, Tracy, and Plumer received letter after letter from New England, all telling the same story. The eminent Judge Tapping Reeve, of Connecticut, wrote to Tracy: "I have seen many of our friends; and all that I have seen and most that I have heard from believe that we must separate, and that this is the most favorable moment." He had heard only one objection,—that the country was not prepared; but this objection,