working chiefly through private correspondence, he constructed a great
party, dominated a nation, and dominated it mainly for good. For the
rapid and complete triumph of Jefferson's party over its opponents
signifies a very definite and lasting conversion of the main stream of
American public opinion to what may be called the sane element in the
principles of the French Revolution. At the time when he set himself to
counterwork Hamilton, American statesmanship was likely to be directed
only to making Government strong and to ensuring the stability of the
business world; for reaction against the bloody absurdities that had
happened in France was strong in America, and in English thought, which
still had influence in America, it was all-powerful. Against this he
asserted an intense belief in the value of freedom, in the equal claim of
men of all conditions to the consideration of government, and in the
supreme importance to government of the consenting mind of the governed.
And he made this sense so definitely a part of the national stock of
ideas that, while the older-established principles of strong and sound
government were not lost to sight, they were consciously rated as
subordinate to the principles of liberty.

It must not be supposed that the ascendency thus early acquired by what
may be called liberal opinions in America was a matter merely of setting
some fine phrases in circulation, or of adopting, as was early done in
most States, a wide franchise and other external marks of democracy. We
may dwell a little longer on the unusual but curiously popular figure of
Jefferson, for it illustrates the spirit with which the commonwealth
became imbued under his leadership. He has sometimes been presented as a
man of flabby character whose historical part was that of intermediary
between impracticable French "philosophes" and the ruffians and swindlers
that Martin Chuzzlewit encountered, who were all "children of liberty,"
and whose "boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant was that their