The Philadelphia grand jury indicted Dennie for this paragraph as a seditious libel, but it was not more expressive than the single word uttered by Alexander Hamilton, who owed no small part of his supremacy to the faculty of expressing the prejudices of his followers more tersely than they themselves could do. Compressing the idea into one syllable, Hamilton, at a New York dinner, replied to some democratic sentiment by striking his hand sharply on the table and saying, “Your people, sir,--your people is a great _beast_!” The political theories of these ultra-conservative New Englanders did not require the entire exclusion of all democratic influence from government. “While I hold,” said Cabot, “that a government altogether popular is in effect a government of the populace, I maintain that no government can be relied on that has not a material portion of the democratic mixture in its composition.” Cabot explained what should be the true portion of democratic mixture: “If no man in New England could vote for legislators who was not possessed in his own right of two thousand dollars’ value _in land_, we could do something better.” The Constitution of Massachusetts already restricted the suffrage to persons “having a freehold estate within the commonwealth of an annual income of three pounds, or any estate of the value of sixty pounds.” A further restriction to freeholders whose estate was worth two thousand dollars would hardly have left a material mixture of any influence which democrats would have recognized as theirs.