Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition.

by John H. Van Evrie

In England it is a practice which the idea has simply originated in. Official employments, pensions and special legislation or monopolies in England, embrace all or nearly all the ruling class, and therefore, the idea that government is established for their benefit necessarily follows. This idea of government is generally embraced by the northern mind even in our own times, and the habit of looking to this vast and beneficent power as the source of pecuniary benefits to the people, if not to a class, is almost universal among the northern people.

Hamilton, brought up under the British system, was deeply imbued with it, and, placed in power, it was natural enough that he and his associates should construe the Constitution in a way to give it effect. The state debts that were contracted for carrying on the war were assumed by the new government and formed a basis for a national bank which was soon established, and the rapid restoration of public credit that followed the restoration of public order and a settled society in a young and vigorous country was claimed by the federal writers as a proof of the wisdom of their policy and the extraordinary ability of their leader.

Mr. Jefferson opposed this policy from the beginning in all its aspects—the adoption of the British system of finance, the assumption of state debts, the creation of a national bank, in short, the entire programme of federal policy. He held with the state-rights democracy of our day, that the central government was a factitious and limited government, whose powers were derived, not from the collective people but from the people of the several or United States, that the Constitution should be literally construed, and the practice under it strictly confined to the plainly enumerated objects, and, therefore, that the creation of a national bank, assumption of state debts, etc., were unconstitutional in principle and dangerous in practice.

Hamilton and his party, on the contrary, held that the financial policy they adopted was not only the wisest that was possible under the circumstances, but that the consequences likely to follow—the consolidation of power and prestige of the central government—would be of the greatest possible value to the people. Indeed, the old contest between Massachusetts and Virginia—the conflict of ideas—the warfare of widely different mental habits which preceded and ushered in the government were renewed and accompanied by a bitterness of spirit quite unknown in the former case. Hamilton, impelled by the opinions of the North, assumed in practice, if not in theory always, that the central government sprung from the collective or the American people instead of the people of the States, and was almost unlimited in its powers, and he doubtless believed that the more extended its powers, the safer and more stable would become the country and the more prosperous the people. He had failed to obtain such a government as he especially desired—a government after the English model—republican in form but aristocratic in fact, a government based on those artificial distinctions which the mental habits of the North were accustomed to regard as the only safe foundation, and now in power, with the prestige of the great name of Washington to support his policy, he doubtless believed himself a patriot, and as performing vital service to his country and to posterity, when he thus construed the Constitution and consolidated the powers of the federal system.

Indeed, the fear of the people—of a reckless and disorderly multitude—was the abiding sentiment of the great northern leaders, and the consolidation, power, and grandeur of a central government that should restrain them was the object of all their efforts. Thus, the very objects the federalists aimed at—doubtless from patriotic motives, for there being no laws of primogeniture there was no permanent class to be benefited by their policy—were the very things that Mr. Jefferson and his friends contemplated as the greatest danger to the country. Hamilton desired to construe the Constitution in a way to build up an enormous central power that should hold in check the tendencies to disruption and disorder, while Jefferson believed that the greater the assumption and the consolidation of power in the federal system the greater the danger to the freedom of the States and to the people.

Or, in other words, the federalists believed that the more the central power was enlarged the greater the scope and strength of the federal government—the more certain were the States to be kept from disunion and the restless multitudes from anarchy, while Jefferson and his party believed that this assumption of power in the central government would result in the overthrow of the government itself if there was no other way of obtaining redress and of preserving on the part of the States and the people of the States the liberties which they fought for in 1776. Such was the great civil contest that sprung up under the administration of Washington, but which was constantly restrained by the presence of that great man, who, without any very decided leanings as regarded the parties to it, was, moreover, eminently practical and earnestly disposed to favor conciliation and peace rather than commit himself to the abstract opinions of either side. It was only, therefore, during the succeeding administration of Adams that this fundamental conflict of ideas—this conflict which involved the very foundations of government itself, and which, back of the immediate actors that figured in the scene, originated in the different mental habits that spring of necessity from different social conditions, reached its culmination and prepared the way for that final solution which the great civil revolution of 1800 afterwards accomplished.

The federalists, or, more properly, the centralists, had construed the Constitution in a way to make the government in practice substantially what they believed it should have been in theory. They had adopted the British system of finance, had created a national debt and a national bank, which, as in England, was to be the agency for the deposit and disbursement of the public revenue, and, from the necessities of the case, a vast and overshadowing monopoly which was to hold the credit of the States, and of every individual in the States, at its mercy. In fact, the States were rapidly sinking into mere dependencies and subject provinces of the vast and overshadowing power of the central government, which, not content with its usurpations over the States—tending, in practice, to almost obliterate the lines of State sovereignty—even sought to strike down the liberty of the individual citizen, and in its alien and sedition laws to exercise absolute powers. These laws authorized the president to imprison and punish citizens and others as his fears or caprices might dictate, with few, if any, greater safeguards for the citizen than in absolute governments of the Old World.

The federal party embodied the British idea of government, and their notions of liberty differed little, if any, from those of the mother country. Liberty in England consists in the equal protection of person and property in an ordinary sense, but, as liberty, in fact, consists in an equal citizenship or an equal voice in the creation of laws that all are called on to obey, of course those who have no vote or voice in these laws are, to that extent, slaves. It was the policy of the federalists to limit this great natural right of suffrage, and in all the States where they were in the ascendency they sought to do so, as indeed was legitimate and consistent with their fundamental idea of government. Equally consistent and legitimate was their habit of expecting pecuniary benefits from government, for this, as has been said, was the practice in England, and the idea or theory that sprung from it was deeply engraved on the northern mind. While the federalists, therefore, sought to consolidate power in the hands of the federal government and to weaken the States, all the selfish and mercenary interests of the day were naturally attracted to a party whose public policy thus favored and invited their coöperation.

The conflict of labor and capital—the frightful antagonism between those whose labor produces all wealth and those who own the wealth produced by past generations of laborers—is at the bottom of all the revolutions and civil commotions of modern times, for it involves the whole subject of government, as well as all those mighty social evils which so disfigure and deform European society. In England this conflict has, in one sense, reached its utmost limit—while in another respect it may be said to be least active or less palpable than anywhere else.

The few who own the wealth produced by past generations are the wealthiest in the world, while the many who produce all the wealth of the present are undoubtedly the poorest!