nce between the two great political parties here, you conclude
it to be, 'whether the controlling power shall be vested in this or that
set of men.' That each party endeavors to get into the administration of
the government, and to exclude the other from power, is true, and may
be stated as a motive of action: but this is only secondary; the primary
motive being a real and radical difference of political principle. I
sincerely wish our differences were but personally who should govern
and that the principles of our constitution were those of both parties.
Unfortunately, it is otherwise; and the question of preference between
monarchy and republicanism, which has so long divided mankind elsewhere,
threatens a permanent division here.

Among that section of our citizens called federalists, there are three
shades of opinion. Distinguishing between the leaders and people who
compose it, the leaders consider the English constitution as a model of
perfection, some, with a correction of its vices, others, with all its
corruptions and abuses. This last was Alexander Hamilton's opinion,
which others, as well as myself, have often heard him declare, and that
a correction of what are called its vices, would render the English
an impracticable government.. This government they wished to have
established here, and only accepted and held fast, at first, to the
present constitution, as a stepping-stone to the final establishment of
their favorite model. This party has therefore always clung to England,
as their prototype, and great auxiliary in promoting and effecting this
change. A weighty minority, however, of these leaders, considering the
voluntary conversion of our government into a monarchy as too distant,
if not desperate, wish to break off from our Union its eastern fragment,
as being, in truth, the hot-bed of American monarchism, with a view to a
commencement of their favorite government, from whence the other States
may gangrene by degrees, and the whole be thus brought finally to the
desired point. For Massachusetts, the prime mover in this enterprise, is
the last State in the Union to mean a final separation, as being of all
the most dependant on the others. Not raising bread for the sustenance
her own inhabitants, not having a stick of timber for the construction
of vessels, her principal occupation, nor an article to export in them,
where would she be, excluded from the ports of the other States, and
thrown into dependanc