in his carriage, and after a short interview with the abbess took his daughters away; and thenceforth Martha presided, so far as her age permitted, over her father's household. Not a word upon the subject of her request ever passed between them; and long afterward, in telling the story to her own children, she praised Mr. Jefferson's tact in dealing with what she described as a transient impulse.

After this incident, Jefferson, thinking that it was time to take his daughters home, obtained leave of absence for six months; and the little family landed at Norfolk, November 18, 1789. They journeyed slowly homeward, stopping at one friend's house after another, and, two days before Christmas, arrived at Monticello, where they were rapturously greeted by the slaves, who took the four horses from the carriage and drew it up the steep incline themselves; and when he alighted, Mr. Jefferson, in spite of himself, was carried into the house on the arms of his black servants and friends.

VIII

SECRETARY OF STATE

MR. JEFFERSON had a strong desire to resume his post as minister to France, but he yielded to Washington's earnest request that he should become Secretary of State in the new government. He lingered long enough at Monticello to witness the marriage of his daughter Martha to Thomas Mann Randolph, and then set out upon a cold, wet journey of twenty-one days, reaching New York, which was then the seat of government, late in March, 1790. He hired a small house at No. 57 Maiden Lane, and immediately attacked the arrears of work which had been accumulating for six months. The unusual confinement, aggravated, perhaps, by a homesickness, clearly revealed in his letters, for his daughters and for Monticello, brought on what seems to have been a

neuralgic headache which lasted for three weeks. It may have been caused in part by the climate of New York, as to which Mr. Jefferson observed: "Spring and fall they never have, so far as I can learn. They have ten months of winter, two of summer, with some winter days interspersed." But there were other causes beside homesickness and headache which made Jefferson unhappy in his new position. Long afterward he described them as follows:

"I had left France in the first year of her Revolution, in the fervor of natural rights and zeal for reformation. My conscientious devotion to those rights could not be heightened, but it had been aroused and excited by daily exercise. The President received me cordially, and my colleagues and the circle of principal citizens apparently with welcome. The courtesies of dinners given to me, as a stranger newly arrived among them, placed me at once in their familiar society. But I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversations filled me. Politics were

the chief topic, and a preference of kingly over republican government was evidently the favorite sentiment. An apostate I could not be, nor yet a hypocrite; and I found myself for the most part the only advocate on the republican side of the question, unless among the guests there chanced to be some member of that party from the legislative houses.”

It must be remembered that Jefferson's absence in France had been the period of the Confederacy, when the inability of Congress to enforce its laws and to control the States was so evident and so disastrous that the need of a stronger central government had been impressed on men's minds. The new Constitution had been devised to supply that need, but it was elastic in its terms, and it avoided all details. Should it be construed in an aristocratic or in a democratic spirit, and should the new nation be given an aristocratic or a democratic twist? This was a burning question, and it gave rise to that long struggle led by Hamilton on one side and by Jefferson on the other, which ended

with the election of Jefferson as President in the year 1800.

Hamilton and his party utterly disbelieved in government by the people.1 John Adams declared that the English Constitution, barring its element of corruption, was an ideal constitution. Hamilton went farther and asserted that the English form of government, corruption and all, was the best practicable form. An aristocratic senate, chosen for a long term, if not for life, was thought to be essential even by Mr. Adams. Hamilton's notion was that mankind were incapable of self-government, and must be governed in one or two ways, by force or by fraud. Property was, in his view, the ideal basis of government; and he was inclined to fix the possession of "a thousand Spanish dollars " as the proper qualification for a

voter.

The difference between the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian view arises chiefly from

1 The father of Miss Catherine Sedgwick was a leading Federalist, and his daughter records that, though a most kind-hearted man, he habitually spoke of the people as "Jacobins" and "miscreants."