Page:Memoir upon the negotiations between Spain and the United States of America which led to the treaty of 1819.djvu/129

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��ominous without doul)t to the prosperity of the Re- piiblick.*

When the Presidents are of the democratick party, they distribute oflRces only among their own party, and leave nothing undone to please the po- pulace, and obtain the favour of the multitude: they thus manage to keep themselves for a long time at the head of the nation, and to be reelected a second time — that is to say, for eight years, as has already been the case with all the Presidents, with the ex- ception of the second, Mr. Adams, over whom de- mocracy triumplied, giving him a successor at the end of the first four years. The present President,

��* It is not possible, that the author can here be giving the result of his own observations: there is too much in it of the slang of party, to have come from one who felt no party attachments. There seems to be a strange and unaccountable sympathy, existing between all foreigners, of a certain class, and that party, to which Don Onis assigns all the respectability and talents of the country. No intimacies are formed, while such foreigners remain in the country, but with them — no familiar intercourse, by which alone they could judge of the characters of men, subsists but with them; hence it is, that they ^nd estates, character, and talents so "seldom united, except among the federalists." No foreigner, unprompted, could think of denominating nineteen twentieths of any peo- ple, a political faction, and that is about the proportion be- tween the two parties, of which he speaks, in the United States. But such ridiculous absurdities scarcely deserve no- tice. T.

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