We are content to say with
Webster that the prosperity of American institutions depends upon the
unity and inseparability of individual and local liberties and a
national union. We are content to declare that the United States must
remain somehow a free and a united country, because there can be no
complete unity without liberty and no salutary liberty outside of a
Union. But the difficulties with this phrase, its implications and
consequences, we do not sufficiently consider. It is enough that we have
found an optimistic formula wherewith to unite the divergent aspects of
the Republican, and Federalist doctrines.
We must begin, consequently, with critical accounts of the ideas both of
Jefferson and of Hamilton; and we must seek to discover wherein each of
these sets of ideas was right, and wherein each was wrong; in what
proportions they were subsequently combined in order to form "our noble
national theory," and what were the advantages, the limitations, and the
effects of this combination. I shall not disguise the fact that, on the
whole, my own preferences are on the side of Hamilton rather than of
Jefferson.
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