As the French Revolution grew more portentous and interesting, and its agents busied themselves with efforts to draw America into the European contest as an ally, or rather as a dependency, of Republican France, the political antagonism of the “Federalists” and the “Republicans” grew dangerously high and hot. Men wore French or English Cockades in the streets of New York and Philadelphia. A distinguished public man of Massachusetts once told me that his earliest recollection of any political event took him back to a day on which a friend of his father, who was a leading Federalist of Massachusetts, met him in the streets coming home from school, and, giving him a bright Spanish dollar, said, “Now, Jack, run as fast as you can to your father’s court, and tell him from me that Robert Spear’s head has been cut off, and he must give you just such another dollar!” News came at long intervals then from Europe to America, and the tidings of the fall of Robespierre had that morning reached Boston. Under the stress of these emotions the “Republicans” took to denouncing the “Federalists” as “Monocrats” and “Anglomen,” and the “Federalists” retorted by reviling their opponents as “Jacobins” and “Democrats.” The “Federalist” party held its own during the two Presidencies of Washington, and elected John Adams to succeed the “Father of his country” in 1796. Under the Presidency of Mr. Adams the “Federalists” lost their heads, and the “Republicans” in the year 1800 took possession of power under the first Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. They had for some time been known commonly as “Democratic Republicans,” and in the ninth Congress which met under the second Presidency of Jefferson in 1805 they boldly took the name of “Democrats,” in the spirit of good Bishop Willegis, who put the wagoner’s wheel into his coat-of-arms, and like the “Gueux,” the “Huguenots,” and the “Roundheads,” extracting “glory out of bitterness.” From that time to this the “Democratic” party has continued to be what Jefferson made it, the party of “Home Rule” as opposed to centralisation, and of a strict construction of the organic law by which the provisions and the limitations of Federal power are sanctioned and defined, as against that plausible paternalism under cover of which, in the language of a great living leader of the Democratic party, Senator Bayard of Delaware, “the general government assumes guardianship and protection over the business of the private citizen, and functions of control over matters of domestic and local interest.” * * * * *