effects of this combination. I shall not disguise the fact that, on the
whole, my own preferences are on the side of Hamilton rather than of
Jefferson. He was the sound thinker, the constructive statesman, the
candid and honorable, if erring, gentleman; while Jefferson was the
amiable enthusiast, who understood his fellow-countrymen better and
trusted them more than his rival, but who was incapable either of
uniting with his fine phrases a habit of candid and honorable private
dealing or of embodying those phrases in a set of efficient
institutions. But although Hamilton is much the finer man and much the
sounder thinker and statesman, there were certain limitations in his
ideas and sympathies the effects of which have been almost as baleful as
the effects of Jefferson's intellectual superficiality and insincerity.
He perverted the American national idea almost as much as Jefferson
perverted the American democratic idea, and the proper relation of these
two fundamental conceptions one to another cannot be completely
understood until this double perversion is corrected.

To make Hamilton and Jefferson exclusively responsible for this double
perversion is, however, by no means fair. The germs of it are to be
found in the political ideas and prejudices with which the American
people emerged from their successful Revolutionary War. At that time,
indeed, the opposition between the Republican and the Federalist
doctrines had not become definite and acute; and it is fortunate that
such was the case, because if the opponents of an efficient Federal
constitution had been organized and had been possessed of the full
courage and consciousness of their convictions, that instrument would
never have been accepted, or it would have been accepted only in a much
more mutilated and enfeebled condition. Nevertheless, the different
political points of view which afterwards developed into Hamiltonian
Federalism and Jeffersonian Republicanism were latent in the interests