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THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA
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the commercial and manufacturing interests in the East. He said "that he did not like throwing too much into democratic hands; that if they would not do what the Constitution called on them to do, the government would be at an end, and must then assume another form." He stopped here, says Jefferson, "and I kept silence to see if he would say anything more in the same line, or add any qualifying expression to soften what he had said, but he did neither." There was one superior to Washington among the statesmen who surrounded him—Alexander Hamilton; and his prognostications were still more gloomy. He said: "It is my own opinion that the present government is not that which will answer the ends of society, by giving stability and protection to its rights, and it will probably be found expedient to go into the British form." "A dissolution of the Union after all seems to be the most likely result." Later in his life he called the Constitution a frail and worthless fabric, and a temporary bond. The first President after Washington, John Adams, said "he saw no possibility of continuing the Union of the States; that their dissolution must necessarily take place." On another occasion he pointed out the quarter from which he anticipated danger. "No Republic," he said, "could ever last that had not a Senate deeply and strongly rooted, strong enough to bear up against all popular storms and passions. That as to trusting to a popular assembly for the preservation of our liberties, it was the merest chimera imaginable; they never had any rule of decision but their own will."

If I were to continue my extracts I could still more clearly show that the authors of the most celebrated Democracy in history esteemed that the most formidable dangers which menaced the stability of their work were the very principles of Democracy itself. With them the establishment of a Republican government was not the result of theory, but of necessity. They possessed no aristocracy, and no king, but otherwise they inherited our English laws, and strove to adapt them as faithfully as possible to a society constituted so differently from that