and
Spain, and introduced merino sheep into New England. Barlow, as we have
already seen, was Ambassador to France at the time of his death. All of
these, except Trumbull, had borne arms, and did not throw away their
shields like Archilochus and Horace. They were sincere patriots, who
honestly predicted a future of boundless progress in wealth, science,
religion, and virtue for the United States,--the exemplar of liberty and
justice to the world, "surpassing all nations that have ever existed, in
magnitude, felicity, and duration." And on the other hand, every one of
them believed in the decline and impending fall of their old enemy,
Great Britain. Barlow's "Hesper" even hints that a Columbus from New
England may one day rediscover the Old World.

After the peace, when the closer union of the States under one general
government was proposed, the Hartford Wits worked hard to argue down and
to laugh down the bitter and absurd opposition which sprang up. That
great question was settled definitively by the adoption of the new
Constitution, and another took its place: How is this document to be
interpreted? The Hartford men, excepting, of course, Joel Barlow, the
Lost Pleiad of the group, whose head had been turned by the bewildering
theories of his French fellow-citizens, were warmly in favor of
administering the new government on Federal principles. Were not the
Federalists right? More than thirty years ago, De Tocqueville pronounced
in their favor; De Witt, in his recent essay on Jefferson, comes to the
same decision: both observers who have no party-feelings nor
class-prejudices to mislead them. And have not the last few years given
us all light enough to see that abstractly, as statesmen, the Federal
leaders were right? As politicians, in the degraded American sense of
the word, they were unskilful; they accelerated the downfall of their
party by injudicious measures and by petty rivalries. But although their
ruin might have been adjourned, it could not have been avoided; we now
know that their fate was inevitable. The democracy must have run over
them and trodden them out by the sheer brute force of numbers; no
superiority in wisdom or in virtue could have saved them long.

In those hot and angry days a _mania politica_ raged among the
inhabitants of the United States. One could no longer recognize the
sensible people who had fought the British stoutly for seven years,
without the slightest idea that they were struggl