Excerpt from The Democratic Party Very soon after the end of the American Revolution Jef ferson went to Paris, where he lived durin several years of the intellectual ferment which preceded t e cataclysm of the French Revolution. After our Constitution was formed and Washington's administration was well under wa Jef ferson, returning home, was still, or perhaps more zea ously, an apostle of t e rights of man - a thorough-going icono clast toward every image of government as an earthly deity. To his influence we ...
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Excerpt from The Democratic Party Very soon after the end of the American Revolution Jef ferson went to Paris, where he lived durin several years of the intellectual ferment which preceded t e cataclysm of the French Revolution. After our Constitution was formed and Washington's administration was well under wa Jef ferson, returning home, was still, or perhaps more zea ously, an apostle of t e rights of man - a thorough-going icono clast toward every image of government as an earthly deity. To his influence we probably owe the first ten amendments of the Federal Constitution - that bill of rights which has been so largel copied into the constitutions of the Ameri can States. Hey form a series of declarations of jealousy of government, or rather of the bodies of men who from time to time compose government. Their meaning is that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance toward rulers - not less toward rulers elected by the peo lo than toward those set over the people by the once usefu but now absurd sys tem of primogeniture. While he was the nominal head of Washington's cabinet, J efferson and his friends viewed with intense dislike the effort of Hamilton and his friends to form into a governing class the citizens who had property, the citizens who, through a dan erous slip, were called the well-born, and their efiort to odge in the Federal Gov ernment the chief political powers of every State. Hamil ton, you will gerhaps remember, had proposed life-tenure for the Presi cut and senators, and the appointment of governors of the States by Federal authority, with the power to every governor of an absolute veto upon the legislation of his State. In our admiration for 1118 great powers and our gratitude for his splendid services in setting up the framework of our Government, it is sometimes orgotten that the Federal Constitution is a radically difierent thing from what Hamilton would have had it; that but little of it is his handiwork; that it represents quite as much, to say the least, the Democratic view as the Federalist view of American politics. In rivate Hamilton declared it to be a frail and worthless ia ric. Democracy - and by that he meant the eager jealous participation of all citizens in the Government, as well those whom he deemed unimportant and incompetent as those who held responsible places in the community and were skilled in an'aire - Democracy, he de clared just before his death, to be a virulent poison. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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