Page:Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.djvu/56

40 Such was the temper of the people and the times in Kentucky when the news was slowly brought to them of the progress of events at the seat of government. It does not require any very acute student of history to see how the people and the times interacted on each other, nor how fully in accord they were just at this time. The stubble was dry; with the first breath of flame it was ready to spring into full blaze. It was one great conflagration from the moment that it was known that the Alien and Seditions acts were likely to pass the houses and become laws.

It is easy to understand the profound impression made in Kentucky by the Alien and Sedition laws, when the feeling in other and less radically Democratic States is remembered and their past history considered. The very frame of society seemed to be shaken. The sentiment was unanimous that these measures were transgressions of the limits fixed by the Constitution and aimed at the subversion of the very foundations of liberty. All the old machinery was at once put in motion, and county after county passed resolutions condemning these laws. Public dinners were held at which toasts were drunk in honor of France, of the two great opponents of these laws, Livingston of New York and Gallatin of Pennsylvania, to whom John Nicholas of Virginia was sometimes added, of the Vice-President, "the bulwark of liberty," and also to the right to the navigation of the Mississippi, to the inviolability of the Constitution, etc., the President in all cases being conspicuous by the absence