themselves more distinctly until there was no longer any pretence of
party unity, and the democratic (or republican) party assumed its place,
in 1792-3, as the recognized opponent of the party in power. It would be
beside the purpose to attempt to enumerate the points in which the
natural antagonism of the federalists and the republicans came to the
surface during the decade of contest which ended in the downfall of the
federal party in 1800-1. In all of them, in the struggles over the
establishment of the Bank of the United States and the assumption of the
State debts, in the respective sympathy for France and Great Britain, in
the strong federalist legislation forced through during the war feeling
against France in 1798, the controlling sympathy of the republicans for
individualism and of the federalists for a strong national government is
constantly visible, if looked for. The difficulty is that these
permanent features are often so obscured by the temporary media in which
they appear that the republicans are likely to be taken as a merely
State-rights party, and the federalists as a merely commercial party.

To adopt either of these notions would be to take a very erroneous idea
of American political history. The whole policy of the republicans was
to forward the freedom of the individual; their leader seems to have
made all other points subordinate to this. There is hardly any point in
which the action of the individual American has been freed from
governmental restraints, from ecclesiastical government, from sumptuary
laws, from restrictions on suffrage, from restrictions on commerce,
production, and exchange, for which he is not indebted in some measure
to the work and teaching of Jefferson between the years of 1790 and
1800. He and his party found the States in existence, understood well
that they were convenient shields for the individual against the
possible powers of the new federal government for evil, and made use of
them. The State sovereignty of Jefferson was the product of