After the peace, when the closer union of the States under one general government was proposed, the Hartford Wits worked hard to argue down and to laugh down the bitter and absurd opposition which sprang up. That great question was settled definitively by the adoption of the new Constitution, and another took its place: How is this document to be interpreted? The Hartford men, excepting, of course, Joel Barlow, the Lost Pleiad of the group, whose head had been turned by the bewildering theories of his French fellow-citizens, were warmly in favor of administering the new government on Federal principles. Were not the Federalists right? More than thirty years ago, De Tocqueville pronounced in their favor; De Witt, in his recent essay on Jefferson, comes to the same decision: both observers who have no party-feelings nor class-prejudices to mislead them. And have not the last few years given us all light enough to see that abstractly, as statesmen, the Federal leaders were right? As politicians, in the degraded American sense of the word, they were unskilful; they accelerated the downfall of their party by injudicious measures and by petty rivalries. But although their ruin might have been adjourned, it could not have been avoided; we now know that their fate was inevitable. The democracy must have run over them and trodden them out by the sheer brute force of numbers; no superiority in wisdom or in virtue could have saved them long.
In those hot and angry days a _mania politica_ raged among the inhabitants of the United States. One could no longer recognize the sensible people who had fought the British stoutly for seven years, without the slightest idea that they were struggling for anything more than independence of foreign rule. Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, graduates of the great French Revolution University, had come to teach them the new jargon: the virtue and wisdom of the people; the natural rights of man; the natural propensity of rulers and priests to ignore them; and other similar high-sounding words, the shibboleth and the mainstay of the Democratic party to this day. The Anti-Federalists were as much pleased to learn that they had been contending for these beautiful phrases as was Monsieur Jourdain when told he had been speaking _de la prose_ all his life. They assumed the title of Citizen, invented that of Citess to please strong-minded sisters, and became as crazy as Monsieur Jourdain when invested with the dignity of Mamamouchi. They proclaimed that the government of the United States, like all other governments, was naturally hostile to the rights of the people; France was their only hope; if the leagued despotisms succeeded against her, they would soon send their engines of destruction among them. They planted trees of liberty, and danced about them, and sang the Carmagnole with variations from Yankee Doodle; they offered their lives for liberty, which was in no danger, not even from their follies; and swore destruction to tyrants, as if that unpopular class of persons existed in the United States. They were the people,--the wise, the pure,--who could do no wrong. The Federalists were aristocrats, monocrats,--lovers of court ceremonies and levees, chariots and servants and plate. The distinguished chief of the French party, whose "heart was a perpetual bleeding fountain of philanthropy," was not above pretending to believe that his opponents were striving to "establish the hell of monarchy" in this republican paradise, and were "ready to surrender the commerce of the country, and almost every privilege as a free, sovereign, and independent nation, to the British." Even such a man as Samuel Adams, at a dinner on board of a French frigate, could put the _bonnet rouge_ on his venerable head, and pray that "France alone might rule the seas."