his conclusions, how ever bold or abstract, without troubling to detail his reasoning or clip his off-hand speculations. Certain it is that there is much in his utterances for a less robust democracy than his own to cavil at.[20] Soar, however, as he might, he was essentially not a doctrinaire, but an empiricist; his mind was objective. Though he remained, to the end, firm in his belief that there had been an active monarchist party,[21] this obsession did not carry him out of touch with the realities of human nature and of his time. He built with surety on the colonial past, and had a better reasoned view of the actual future than had any of his contemporaries. Events soon appraised the ultra-Federalist judgment of American democracy, so tersely expressed by Fisher Ames as "like death ... only the dismal passport to a more dismal hereafter"; and, with it, appraised Jefferson's word in his first inaugural for those who, "in the full tide of successful experiment," were ready to abandon a government that had so far kept them "free and firm, on the visionary fear that it might by possibility lack energy to preserve itself." Time soon tested, too, his principle that that government must prove the strongest on earth "where every man ... would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern." He summed up as follows the difference between himself and the Hamiltonian group: "One feared most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them." Jefferson, in short, had unlimited faith in the honesty of the people; a large faith in their common sense; believed that all is to be won by appealing to the reason of voters; that by education their ignorance can be eliminated; that human nature is indefinitely perfectible; that majorities rule, therefore, not only by virtue of force (which was Locke's ultimate justification of them), but of right.[22] His importance as a maker of modern America can scarcely be overstated, for the ideas he advocated have become the very foundations of American republicanism. His administration ended the possibility, probability or certainty--measure it as one will--of the development of Federalism in the direction of class government; and the party he formed, inspired by the creed he gave it, fixed the democratic future of the nation. And by his own labours he had vindicated his faith in the experiment of self-government.