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6 a little startling to men who had made this their bête noir. The prophet of such a change would have been laughed to scorn half a dozen years before. Indeed, few of this class, even those who fancied themselves most familiar with the instrument, thought it possible to create such a power in so brief a space of time out of the Constitution. This was doubtless due to a failure to give adequate weight and consideration to two factors which were destined to effect materially the result; first, the capacity of the country for great and rapid growth, and second, of even more immediate influence, the means and methods that would at once be called into being to effectuate the plain provisions of the Constitution. To those who occupied this position the financial operations of Hamilton were not merely unlooked-for, but they assumed the aspect of unwarranted, and even wicked, violations of the Constitution. Thus step by step as the work of organization went on, the central government developed a power and patronage which was at once surprising and highly disapproved of by many sometime ardent Federalists; and thereby steadily estranging many from the administration, it built up an opposition, and an opposition that had a firmer party-basis than most of those who composed it realized.

This fundamental division of political opinion, which has now come to be universally recognized, may be wholly or partly concealed by the temper of certain times or the absorbing claims of specific measures, but nevertheless it is always present,