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his influence has been useful we would rather leave it to the biographer to say. A humanitarianism' which is ready to butcher all mankind but a single pair in order to carry out a theory seems a questionable substitute even for common Christianity. Jefferson was the champion of religious equality in Virginia, and as president he did a very good thing in purchasing Louisiana, though the act was a breach of the constitution, and had it been done by Hamilton would have drawn from Jefferson shrieks of monocracy' and 'consolidation.' In the Kentucky resolutions he proclaimed the fatal doctrine of nullification, and pulled the trigger of civil war. His notions of finance and economy, if they were anything more than factious contradictions of Hamilton's views, were absurd, and in that department he did all the mischief in his power. He behaved as ill to Hamilton as he could and as ill to Washington as he dared. Over the 'Ana' admiring biography can only draw a decent veil.

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It is needless to say that the impress of Jefferson's mind remains indelibly stamped on the Declaration of Independence. No other theorist has been so fortunate in having his fancies indelibly carved on public marble. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organising its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." So wrote the owner of fifty slaves, whom he never emancipated, or, we believe, showed any practical inclination to emancipate; while, if he framed a project of abolition, it was allowed to drop so easily that it can be regarded as little more than an ostensible tribute to consistency. Nothing,' said Calhoun a generation afterwards, 'can be more unfounded and false than the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal: it rests upon the assumption of a fact which is contrary to universal observation.' Jefferson, as is well known, had framed a clause denouncing in the most truculent language George the Third as the author of slavery and the slave trade. But this was disapproved by some Southern gentlemen.' The issue was a constitution which recognised slavery, under a shuffling alias, perpetuated the slave trade for twenty years, with an indefinite prospect of further extension, and embodied a fugitive slave law. The colonial legislation restricting the importation of slaves, in disallowing which Jefferson accuses the King of prostituting his negative, was, as Jefferson well knew, not moral in its object, but commercial. If it was moral, why was it not renewed when the

colonists were their own masters? We do not wish to press the charge of hypocrisy too far; it is true that emancipation was difficult, but it is also true that there were difficulties in the path of the ministers of George the Third. The preposterous violence and the manifest insincerity of the suppressed clause are enough to create suspicion as to the spirit in which the whole document was framed. In fact, the Declaration of Independence is not more scrupulously truthful than are the general utterances of a statesman for whom his biographers do not venture to claim the credit of strict veracity. In its preamble it enumerates as normal examples of the King's government and justifications of insurrection acts which, however unadvised, were really measures of repression, taken after the insurrection had broken out. No government could allow its officers to be assaulted and their houses sacked, its loyal lieges to be tarred and feathered, or the property of merchants sailing under its flag to be thrown by lawless hands into the sea.

Republican institutions, if they exclude hereditary title, admit family distinction. The Massachusetts house of Adams might with some reason call itself the first political family in the world. It has given, in the direct line, two presidents to the republic; it has produced an ambassador whose task was hardly less important and certainly not less trying than that of any president, and its fertility appears not to be exhausted, though the times are not propitious to its prominence so far as active politics are concerned. John Adams, the founder of the line, was a specimen of the highest type of politician formed by the municipal life of New England, and of all engaged in the revolution, with the possible exception of Washington, the man whose character we should say does most to justify or redeem the movement. As Novanglus' he is its great apologist, and weak enough from the constitutional point of view his apology is. It is surely idle to contend that under a parliamentary monarchy the connection of a dependency was with the king alone, and not with parliament. Where was the sovereign power? To whom did colonial commerce look for protection? Equally idle does it seem to contend that the King in dealing with the colonies acted in his personal capacity only, not in his political capacity and as the head of a constitutional government. Adams is much more rational when he says that the whole system of colonial government had been left in a very unsettled and equivocal state. Powers had, in fact, been legally retained by the Imperial Government which it was practically wrong and unsafe to exercise. Hence arose the quarrel; and this is precisely the relation which the framers of the Irish Government Bill purpose deliberately to create between the British Parliament and Ireland. At the same time John Adams was not free from the traits of the conspirator. He continued to express attachment to the connection with Great Britain and grief at the

idea of separation at a time when it is certain that he had set his heart on separation, and had formed a settled plan of independence. The disclosure of his real sentiments and designs, through the capture and publication of his secret correspondence, scattered dismay among those whom he had been luring to the brink of civil war by his professions of moderation. That there should have been a necessity for resorting to such acts, we must repeat, proves that there did not exist among the people in general a sense of such oppression as alone, we should say, can warrant any one in enticing a community into revolution and civil war. It tends to show that the catastrophe was not inevitable, but was brought on by the scheming activity of a comparatively small group of violent and ambitious men, combined perhaps with the interest of traders galled by the pestilent restrictions on trade. We also see in Adams's diary the bacchanalian element of the revolution in some force. In the evening at Mr. Mifflin's' there was an elegant supper and we drank sentiments till eleven o'clock. Lee and Harrison were very high. Lee had dined with Mr. Dickinson and drank Burgundy the whole afternoon. In such councils it was resolved that, to avenge a paltry blunder committed by a particular British minister, the grand and beneficent unity of the Anglo-Saxon race should be dissolved, perhaps for ever. It would be well if, when civil war impends, patriots could be made to drink water. The man who burns like Camille Desmoulins 'to embrace liberty, though it were on a heap of corpses,' if he is not mad or desperately wicked, is probably drunk. The revolution over, however, John Adams stands in history a strong, upright, and conscientious servant of the State, rugged and gnarled as an old oak, but not less firmly rooted in his patriotism or less steadfast in resisting the adverse gales, from whatever quarter they might blow, whether from that of extreme federalism and fond attachment to England, or from that of extreme democracy and the subserviency of sham sansculottism to France. By his defence of Preston and the soldiers he had given noble proof of his antipathy to mob violence as well as of his humanity. To the yoke of the Caucus his neck was never bowed. Nor, though a republican, was he a demagogue, or even an extreme democrat. He firmly believed, as his biographer truly says, in government by a class duly qualified by intelligence and public virtue of all aristocracies the most offensive to St. Just, who thought it the height of impiety in any one to pretend to intelligence or virtue, but especially to virtue, in presence of the divine people. In his suggestion for the regulations of the president's household Adams even shows a tendency to surround republican authority with a good deal of state. Hamilton in the present day would be utterly impossible as an American politician. Only one degree less impossible would be John Adams.

John Randolph was a genuine Virginian gentleman, an authentic 'F.F.V.' He combined in the proper measure aristocratic prejudices and arrogance with a democracy which meant hatred of all authority above his own, and he united English tastes to French revolutionary principles. He was no doubt, like others of the same group, well read in English literature, at least of the lighter kind. He had certainly read Fielding, and was thus enabled to get himself into a duel by comparing an alliance between the 'Puritan' Quincy Adams and the 'black-leg' Clay to an alliance of Blifil with Black George. It seems that he once made a will emancipating his slaves, but if ever he dallied with philanthropy, the dalliance was brief. Thus he writes:

There is a meeting-house in the village built by a respectable denomination. I never was in it, though, like myself, it is mouldering away. The pulpit of that meeting-house was polluted by permitting a black African to preach in it. If I had been there I would have taken the uncircumcised dog by the throat, led him before a magistrate, and committed him to jail. I told the ladies, they, sweet souls, who dressed their beds with the whitest sheets and uncorked for him their best wine, were not far from having negro children.

Randolph had a rare gift of vituperative declamation by which he seems to have kept up a sort of reign of terror. This, combined with his social position, enabled him to do what he pleased and treat the Senate like a hunting kennel. If he ever had anything nearer akin to statesmanship in him, it had been shattered by his passions, which from his childhood had no doubt been uncontrolled. Giving utterance to everything that came into his head and for hours together, he sometimes gave utterance to a home truth.

Albert Gallatin was a Genevan who, dissatisfied with the conservatism of a republic in the politics of which Calvin still made. head politically against Rousseau, came to drink in independence in the freest country in the universe.' He may be regarded as the first-fruits of the political emigration from Europe which assumed large proportions after 1848, and while, on the one hand, it has given to the republic such citizens as Carl Schurz, has, on the other hand, given birth to the anarchism of Chicago. He brought out here, of course, a hatred of strong government and a special desire to crush aristocracy,' the grand bugbear of the extreme democrat, with whom social rather than political equality is usually the chief object of desire. In this way Gallatin found that he had as long a day's work before him in the freest country in the universe as he would have had in Geneva; for in Philadelphia there was social inequality, the offspring of wealth which had been made by speculation and was not always in the worthiest hands. Gallatin went out upon the land, but apparently did not fare much better than other Utopians who have taken the same line. His revolutionary principles involved him rather unfortunately in the Whisky insurrection, which, by the way, VOL. XXIII.-No. 131.

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gave birth to boycotting, full blown and clearly defined. But he ultimately became sober, and distinguished himself as a not immoderately factious or tricky leader of the democratic party in Congress, a strict financial economist, and an organiser of the Treasury Department. There being no 'Genevan vote' to command the homage of politicians, Gallatin's foreign origin was sometimes cast in his teeth.

It is to be hoped that Lives of Gouverneur Morris and Fisher Ames are to be included in the series. They would be at least as well worth having as Lives of Randolph and Gallatin.

The volumes which we have noticed chiefly relate to the period of the Fathers;' we propose hereafter to notice those volumes which comprise the period of the sons.

GOLDWIN SMITH.