The nature of the sovereignty that was to be the result of American political experiment, the amount of originality which could be infused into an idea so old, was a matter for future history to settle. Many years were likely to elapse before the admitted practice of the government and people could be fully adopted into the substance of their law, but the process thus far had been rapid. In the brief space of thirty years, between 1787 and 1817,--a short generation,--the Union had passed through astonishing stages. Probably no great people ever grew more rapidly and became more mature in so short a time. The ideas of 1787 were antiquated in 1815, and lingered only in districts remote from active movement. The subsidence of interest in political theories was a measure of the change, marking the general drift of society toward practical devices for popular use, within popular intelligence. The only work that could be said to represent a school of thought in politics was written by John Taylor of Caroline, and was probably never read,--or if read, certainly never understood,--north of Baltimore by any but curious and somewhat deep students, although to them it had value. John Taylor of Caroline might without irreverence be described as a _vox clamantis_,--the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by Jefferson, Monroe, John Randolph, and the Virginia school, he admitted, with the geniality of the class to which he belonged, that his disciples invariably deserted in practice the rules they praised in his teaching; but he continued to teach, and the further his scholars drifted from him the more publicly and profusely he wrote. His first large volume, “An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States,” published in 1814, during the war, was in form an answer to John Adams’s “Defence of the Constitutions” published in London twenty-five years before. In 1787 John Adams, like Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and other constitution-makers, might, without losing the interest of readers, indulge in speculations more or less visionary in regard to the future character of a nation yet in its cradle; but in 1814 the character of people and government was formed; the lines of their activity were fixed. A people which had in 1787 been indifferent or hostile to roads, banks, funded debt, and nationality, had become in 1815 habituated to ideas and machinery of the sort on a great scale. Monarchy or aristocracy no longer entered into the public mind as factors in future development. Yet Taylor resumed the discussions of 1787 as though the interval were a blank; and his only conclusion from the experience of thirty years was that both political parties were equally moving in a wrong direction.