THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES. A CHAPTER I. WITHOUT AN ADEQUATE GOVERNMENT. LL beginnings, as George Eliot somewhere says, are make-believes. But for the purposes of this book, we may say that the history of political parties in the United States begins with the organization of the Federalists. The first question to ask of this as of every political party is: "What is it trying to do? what motives influence the men belonging to it to associate together in a political organization? what eralist party was public want does it seek to satisfy?" Let What the Fed organized to do. us put this question to the Federalist party; let us ask what it was organized to do.* *Political Science Quarterly, Vol. VI., 593. To this question it is possible to give a definite answer: The Federalist party was organized to give the country a government with power enough to do the things essential to the well-being of the nation. Powers which Congress might have exercised. From one point of view, there seems no reason why the nation might not have had such a government from the start. In declaring the colonies free the Continental and independent states, the Continental Congress had exercised the highest act of sovereignty. If its members had realized all the consequences of this declaration; if they had seen that it meant the birth of one nation—not thirteen—and that this nation could not be sovereign and independent with reference to other nations without being sovereign with reference to its own constituent parts, the Continental Congress might have assumed, at the outset, to represent in all respects the sovereignty of the new nation. It might have passed such laws as it deemed best, and called upon its armies to execute them. Being revolutionary in its origin, it would have gained all the power to which it could have made good its claim.* *The debate in the Congress of 1774 on the question as to the method of voting, "whether by colonies, or by the poll, or by interests," showed that some of its members appreciated what the logical consequences of separation from Great Britain would be. Patrick Henry said: "Government is dissolved. Where are your landmarks, your boundaries of colonies? We are in a state of nature, sir. . . . The distinction between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American. . . . All America is thrown into one mass."-Works of John Adams, II., 366–8. What the conse have been. But even upon the supposition that the members of the Continental Congress had been able to shake themselves free from their environment, had been able to throw off old habits of thought quences would like a worn-out coat, it is impossible to suppose that the people of the various states would have been able to cut themselves loose from their political past. If, therefore, the Continental Congress had undertaken to play the absolute sovereign, they would have crushed it into atoms. As government is only the executive organ of society, the organ through which its will becomes operative, through which its habit acts,* the consequences of an attempt of the Continental Congress to run directly counter to the will of the people of the various states, to violate all their habits of political thought, would have been its utter annihilation. Characteristics thought of the time. The same traditions and conditions, the same historical antecedents, which prevented the masses of the people from realizing that it was one nation that had become independent, which made of the political it impossible for them to look upon the Continental Congress as their government, which compelled them for the most part to regard any government outside of their state as a foreign government,exerted almost equal force upon the members of the Continental Congress. The "saving grace of common sense," which is never entirely wanting in men of Anglo *Woodrow Wilson's The State, 398. Saxon blood, did indeed make it impossible for them to ignore completely the fact that if there was any sovereign body on this side of the Atlantic, it was the one American people. But in the minds of the men of the time the dim, half-unconscious perception of this truth existed side by side with the very vivid feeling that their state was their country, and that all power rightfully belonged to the individual states. This is how it happened that the actions of the Continental Congress present, from the point of view of The actions of political science, such a jumble of contra the Continental Congress a jum- dictions. When the members of that Con ble of contra dictions. gress were looking towards England, when they were taking measures to free the country from Great Britain, they were guided by their feeling that sovereignty belonged to the American people; when they were looking at the states, their actions were determined by their feeling that the state from which each came was his true country. Compelled inexorably by the conditions which confronted them to exercise power as the representatives of the sovereign American people, they were compelled with equal inexorableness by all their habits of political thought to imagine that they exercised it as the delegates of sovereign states. Regarding themselves as mere agents of their respective states, and Congress as a sort of international body, it was impossible for them to act as a government when their actions directly affected the people of the states. To |