These considerations were alike applicable to, and equally influential upon, the landed interest of the North and of the South. With attachments undiminished and unchangeable to republican principles, pure and simple, subject to such limitations only as were required by convenience in their execution and necessary to deliberation in council, principles the fruition of which had been the day-dream of their ancestors through successive generations, and their own guiding-star in the gloomiest period of the Revolution, the representatives of this great interest, North and South, by large majorities, sustained the Anti-Federal party until that party was overthrown through its great error in respect to the Constitution, and were still ready to take their stand in any organization that should have for its object opposition to the heresies developed by Hamilton in his platform for the government of the administration. The principles upon which the landed interest acted from the start, have, it must be admitted, been more successfully sustained in the Southern than in the Northern States; not because they were originally embraced with more sincerity, but from very different causes. The commercial, manufacturing, and trading classes, to whom Hamilton's policy was more particularly addressed, and upon whom it, beyond all doubt, exerted a powerful influence, were, at the beginning, far more numerous in the Northern than in the Southern States, and this disparity in their respective conditions has been constantly increasing. It was through the growing power of these classes, and of others similarly, though perhaps not equally, exposed to its influence that the Hamiltonian policy occasionally triumphed in the Northern States, and their politics thus became more unstable than those of the South. Mr. Bancroft happily and truly describes the peculiar condition of Southern men in this regard. "An instinctive aversion," says he, "to too much government was always a trait of Southern character expressed in the solitary manner of settling in the country, in the absence of municipal governments, in the indisposition of the scattered inhabitants to engage in commerce, to collect in towns, or to associate in townships under corporate powers. As a consequence there was little commercial industry; and on the soil of Virginia there were no vast accumulations of commercial wealth. The exchanges were made almost entirely--and it continued so for more than a century--by factors of foreign merchants. Thus the influence of wealth, under the modern form of stocks and accumulations of money, was always inconsiderable; and men were so widely scattered--like hermits among the heathen--that far the smallest number were within the reach of the direct influence of the established Church or of Government."[24] [24] Bancroft's _Hist. United States_, Vol. II. p. 189.