1 76 THOMAS JEFFERSON 



but upright and able, has lately furnished us with 

 such an object lesson. In the first eight years of this 

 century the presence of Mr. Jefferson at the head of 

 the government educated the American people in 

 a similar way, but far more potently in that especially 

 plastic and formative time. As a political leader we 

 have hardly seen his equal. He had not the kind 

 of lofty pugnacity which enabled Hutchinson to win 

 victories in the teeth of popular prejudice and clamour, 

 but he had that sympathetic insight into the thoughts 

 and wishes of plain common people which Samuel 

 Adams had, and for the want of which Hutchinson's 

 career, in spite of his great powers and his noble 

 character, was ruined. 



A man of such sympathetic insight into the popu- 

 lar mind a faculty in which Hamilton was almost 

 as lacking as Hutchinson was just the man that 

 was needed at the head of our government in the 

 first decade of the nineteenth century. Jefferson was 

 needed at the helm in 1800 as much as Hamilton 

 was needed in 1790. He never could have done the 

 work of Hamilton or of Madison. They were men 

 of rare constructive genius ; he was not. But when 

 the first work of construction had been done and the 

 government fairly set to work, Jefferson was just the 

 man to carry it along quietly and smoothly until its 

 success passed into a tradition and was thus assured. 

 If he had been the French inconoclast that the 

 Federalists supposed him to be, he could not have 

 achieved any such results. But his career in the 

 presidency, like his earlier career, shows him, not as 

 a Danton, but as a Walpole. Instead of the general 

 overturning which the Federalists had dreaded, the 



