The angry contests which followed each other in rapid and uninterrupted succession during the administration of the elder Adams, partook strongly of this character. They sprung out of questions which arose after the two great parties of the country--which have been substantially kept on foot ever since--had been completely organized and had taken the field, the one to accomplish and the other to resist a great national reform which could only be constitutionally determined through the medium of a struggle for the succession. Of these I have only noticed the alien and sedition laws, and have been induced to make that discrimination partly by a conviction of their superior influence in settling the fate of parties, but principally from their relation to the report upon the question of their constitutionality prepared by Madison, under the invigorating stimulus administered by the ever active and zealous mind of Jefferson. Of this great paper I shall speak again. For an account of those interesting partisan conflicts--which, in comparison with the men and issues of the present day, I may, without, I think, being justly reproached with overpraising the past, call a war of giants--the reader cannot, in my judgment, be referred to a source which is in the main more reliable than Randall's "Life of Jefferson." The descendants of that great and good man have contributed to the preparation of that work, apparently without reserve, a body of information of intense interest with which they have been intrusted, and which has never before been made public. With many of the members of this family it has been my good fortune to become intimately acquainted; it would be difficult to find people anywhere more unobtrusive, notwithstanding their claims upon the respect and consideration of the community, whilst in individual temperament and character they are richly endowed with those amiable, truthful, disinterested, and upright traits for which their progenitor was so greatly distinguished in the estimation of those who knew him well, and who were disposed to do him justice. Mr. Randall has faithfully embodied the valuable materials furnished by them in his work, to the execution of which he has brought, besides talent and industry, a thoroughly democratic spirit. He has entitled himself to credit for permitting Mr. Jefferson and his contemporaries, as well opponents as coadjutors, to speak for themselves in respect to public questions generally. If it should be thought in any quarter that his own commentaries betray too much warmth; and are in some instances of too partisan a character for the right tone of history, it should be remembered that they fall in those respects far short of the writers of the Federal school who have treated of Jefferson; his volumes may with truth be regarded as the first systematic defense of that statesman's entire political career, and it would not be an easy matter for any one, especially for one of Randall's