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But it must not be diminished; and it must not be exposed to any risk of diminution by hazardous speculative investments. During the next fifty years, the American democracy accepted almost literally this Jeffersonian tradition. Until the question of slavery became acute, they ceased to think seriously about political problems.
A central government, constructed on the basis of their democratic creed, would have been a government whose powers were smaller, more rigid, and more inefficiently distributed than those granted under our Federal Constitution as may be seen from the various state constitutions subsequently written under Jeffersonian influence.
Shear, as we came along, I don't know any man that could state the real party issues as squarely. Your castigating exposition of so-called Jeffersonian principles, and your relentless indictment of the resolutions of '98, were were" coughed the captain, dropping into conversation again "were the biggest thing out.
At a later time, in an effort to magnify Jeffersonian simplicity, the story was invented that the President-elect rode unattended to Capitol hill and tied his horse to a tree near the spring. Since Jefferson had been deprived of his wife by death many years before, the social problem was greatly simplified.
This is the so-called Jeffersonian democracy, in which government has no powers but such as it derives from the consent of the governed, and is personal democracy or pure individualism philosophically considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God."
The Democratic party stood more loosely for all the elements that doubted whether this development was democratic or was desirable; all that looked back to Jeffersonian idealism and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth century, or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simplified Utopia founded on grain rather than gold.
It is very generally understood, also, that neither the Jeffersonian nor the Hamiltonian doctrine was entirely adequate, and that in order to reach a correct understanding of the really formative constituent in the complex of American national life, a combination must be made of both Republicanism and Federalism.
Jefferson was a composite of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and if Socrates was not the first Jeffersonian Democrat, then who was? Socrates dwelt on the rights and virtues of the "demos" the Common People. Jefferson uses the expression again and again, and was the one man to popularize the word "Democrat."
Nobody in his five wits will deny that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the law a general control in more public things, but the citizens a more general liberty in private things. Wherever we draw the line, liberty can only be personal liberty; and the most personal liberties must at least be the last liberties we lose. But to-day they are the first liberties we lose.
There was some disaffection among the Democrats themselves, that is, among the radicals who thought that the new code was not sufficiently Jeffersonian. The editor of the Dubuque Express, for example, was severe in his criticisms, but he intimated that he would vote for the Constitution in the interests of party discipline.
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