The attention of every American community which possessed facilities for foreign commerce or manufactures, or for any of the various pursuits enumerated in his great report, and especially when they possessed also superior skill and enterprise, was at once directed to Hamilton's scheme of government for encouragement, and they certainly were not always indisposed to accept the seductive offers held out to them. But fortunately for the country and for the cause of good government there was a class, happily formidable in numbers and in great and sterling qualities, whom no wiles could win from their devotion to early principles and whom government favors could not corrupt. That class was, singularly enough, the landed interest. I say singularly, not because their fidelity to principle was at variance with their history, but with reference to the circumstance that, whilst in England it had been the principal object in building up the money power to restrict the influence of the landed interest, that power was here destined to be itself kept in check by an interest of the same name, however different in character. Mr. Jefferson in his celebrated letter to Mazzei, in 1796, gives a description, which could not be improved, of the then political condition of the country and of its political parties: "Against us," he says, "are the executive, the judiciary, two out of three branches of the Legislature, all the officers of the Government, all who want to be officers, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, British merchants and Americans trading on British capital, speculators and holders in the banks and public funds,--a contrivance invented for the purpose of corruption, and for assimilating us in all things to the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model. The whole body of our citizens, however, remain true to their republican principles; the _whole landed interest is republican_, and so is a great mass of talent." The term "landed interest" in its general signification, and in the sense in which it was used by Mr. Jefferson, referred to those who worked as well as owned the land,--the farmers of the North and the planters of the South,--all who made Agriculture their pursuit; a class which in the earlier periods of our colonial condition constituted almost our entire population, and have at every period in our history vastly exceeded in numbers those engaged in all other pursuits. There is no point of resemblance between them and the landed aristocracy of England, save in that they both represent the landed interest of their respective countries and that they were led in each to oppose the money power. Their difference in other respects is sufficiently manifest.