THE CONSTRUCTIVE STATESMAN 213 



administration had been monopolized by one party, 

 the measures of which, even when most beneficial, had 

 been regarded with widespread distrust and dread ; 

 and that this distrust now seemed all at once to be 

 justified by the passage of laws that were certainly the 

 most atrocious in all our history except the Fugitive 

 Slave Law. If under these circumstances there were 

 some who believed that a confederacy in which such 

 laws might be nullified was preferable to a Union in 

 which men might be sent to jail, as under the Stuart 

 kings, for expressing their honest opinions in the 

 newspapers, we ought not to blame them. Such a 

 Union would not have been worth the efforts that it 

 cost to frame it. Taught by experience, we can now 

 see that the fears expressed or implied in the Ken- 

 tucky resolutions were really groundless. But that 

 they were so, that the people were relieved of such fears 

 and the public confidence restored, so that the Union 

 began for the first time to be really loved and cherished 

 with a sentiment of loyalty, was due chiefly to Jeffer- 

 son's election as President in 1800 and the conservative 

 policy which he thereafter pursued. When the gov- 

 ernment passed out of the hands of the party which 

 had enacted the alien and sedition laws, the dread 

 subsided, and the vitality of the Kentucky resolutions 

 was suspended until Calhoun revived it thirty years 

 later. When that new crisis came, the exigency was 

 such that, if Calhoun had not found the letter of 

 these resolutions ready to hand, the sentiment never- 

 theless existed, out of which he would have made his 

 doctrines. 



In 1799 Madison was again elected a member of 

 the Virginia legislature, and in 1801, at Jefferson's 



