Page:Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.djvu/23

Rh and according to the trend given to political action it is pronounced or obscure; but when this or that diversion has ceased to operate, the old ruts are again followed and the old division made plain. The condition of public affairs, both at home and abroad, during the early years of our national life, ran in courses that made this great division most prominent. Individual tastes were reinforced or modified by the special advantages the one policy or the other offered to the different States or sections of the country. These in turn, even as they dictated, were intensified and accentuated by leanings to British or French sympathies. As the one class of ideas was dominant in one country and the other in the other, they to a remarkable extent came to stand for the two policies. It is almost impossible, at the distance of nearly a century, to regard without the liveliest wonder the intense bitterness engendered by these different foreign attachments, and the tremendous influence which they exerted over the minds of our forefathers between the era of the Revolution and the second war with Great Britain. They were not a mere natural hostility against the mother country growing out of the prolonged war, and an equally natural spirit of gratitude for the timely aid of France. They differed from such sentiments so widely as not even to be comparable to them, and did not end with awakening sympathy and dislike, or even of governing our foreign relations, but extended to our domestic concerns and dictated our home policy. All of these things tended in the