172 THOMAS JEFFERSON 



much power government shall be permitted to exer- 

 cise. Where shall the line be drawn beyond which 

 the governing body shall not be allowed to go ? 

 This has been the fundamental question among all 

 peoples in all lands, and it is the various answers 

 to this question that have made all the differences in 

 the success or the failure of different phases of civil- 

 ization, all the differences between the American 

 citizen and the Asiatic coolie. We might thus take 

 any nation that has ever existed for comparison with 

 the United States, but we choose to take England, 

 because there the will of the people has in all ages 

 been able to assert itself. In countries where the 

 voice of the people has been for a long time silenced, 

 as in France under the old regime and in Russia, 

 we naturally find parties coming up, like the Jacobins 

 and the Anarchists, who would fain destroy all gov- 

 ernment and send us back to savagery ; for in politics 

 as well as in physics it may be said that action and 

 reaction are equal and in opposite directions. But 

 in England, just because the people have always been 

 able to find their voice and use it, things have pro- 

 ceeded normally, in a quiet and slow development, 

 like the unfolding of a flower; and so the differences 

 between parties have never assumed a radically ex- 

 plosive form, but have taken the shape with which we 

 are familiar as the differences between Liberals and 

 Tories. 



Now if we compare parties in America with parties 

 in England, unquestionably the Jeffersonians corre- 

 spond to the Liberals and the Hamiltonians to the 

 Tories. It is, on the whole, the former who wish to 

 restrict, and the latter who wish to enlarge, the powers 



