“I will tell you my thought,” replies Jefferson. “General Schuyler was beaten by that very fortune, added to that very headship of a foremost family, which you hold should have been unanswerable for his election. The people are reaching out, sir, for the republican rule that is their right, and which they conquered from England. You know, as well as I, what followed the peace of Paris in this country. It was not democracy, but aristocracy. The government has been taken under the self-sufficient wing of a handful of families, that, having great property rights, hold themselves forth as heaven-anointed rulers of the land. The people are becoming aroused to both their powers and their rights. In the going of General Schuyler and the coming of Colonel Burr, I find nothing worse than a gratifying notice that American mankind intends to have a voice in its own government.” “You appear pleased, sir,” observes Hamilton bitterly. “Pleased is but a poor word. It no more than faintly expresses the satisfaction I feel.” “You amaze me!” interrupts Adams, as much the aristocrat as either Washington or Hamilton, but of a different tribe. “Do I understand, sir, that you will welcome the rule of the mob?” “The ‘mob,’” retorts Jefferson, “can be trusted to guard its own liberty.. The mob won that liberty, sir! Who, then, should be better prepared to stand sentinel over it? Not a handful of rich snobs, surely, who, in the arrogant idleness which their money permits, play at caste and call themselves an American peerage.” “Government by the mob!” gasps Adams, who, in the narrowness of his New England vanity--honest man!--has passed his life on a self-erected pedestal. “Government by the mob!” “And why not, sir?” demands Jefferson sharply. “It is the mob’s government. Who shall contradict the mob’s right to control its own? Have we but shuffled off one royalty to shuffle on another?” Adams, excellent pig-head, can say no more; besides, he fears the quick-tongued Secretary of State. Hamilton, too, is heedful to avoid Jefferson, and, following that democrat’s declarations anent mob right and mob rule, glances with questioning eye at Washington, as though imploring him to come to the rescue. With this the big President begins to unlimber complacently. “Government, my dear Jefferson,” he says, wheeling himself like some great gun into argumentative position, “may be discussed in the abstract, but must be administered in the concrete. I think a best picture of government is a shepherd with his flock of sheep. He finds them a safety and a better pasturage than they could find for themselves. He is necessary to the sheep, as the sheep are necessary to him. He can be trusted; since his interest is the interest of the flock.”