Although the audacious passion for monarchical government, which the leading Federalists had ventured to revive so soon after the Revolution, was the most exciting of the causes which inflamed the hearts and braced the nerves of the Republicans for the conflict,[31] that was not the first issue to be tried. The nature of the government to be substituted was a question that would not, in the natural order of things, arise until the fate of the existing Constitution had been settled; but as their blood was up and their hands at work, the Republicans resolved, if possible, to strangle the conspiracy against the new-born liberties of the country in both its branches by the same effort. The severity and success of the blows they directed against the restoration of the power and influence of the Crown, in any form, is strikingly illustrated by a comparison of the state in which that question was found and that in which it was left by the civil revolution of 1800. Whilst at the former period the superiority of kingly over republican government was the prevailing and absorbing sentiment among what were called the higher classes, as graphically described by Mr. Jefferson, and substantially corroborated by Gouverneur Morris's letter to Rufus King, the notion that the former would be ever practicable in this country was so thoroughly annihilated by that great struggle as never again to have been whispered in our politics. There is no exaggeration in the affirmation that there has been no day within the last forty years when a proposition for the reëstablishment of monarchy in the United States, however seriously made, could have excited any other emotion than ridicule or contempt, or would not have been deemed more appropriately punished by the administration of the straight-jacket than by a trial for treason. But there has been far greater difficulty in completing the work of resistance to Hamilton's efforts to overthrow the Constitution by subverting it, through the agency of his sapping and mining policy, which was the direct issue in the election of 1800. A constitution had been established, in the construction and ratification of which the Federal party had performed a greater and more effectual part than the party opposed to it. Its general provisions were fully adequate to the support of a republican government. By a successful incorporation of the representative system with the republican form, pure and simple, its framers had happily qualified and adapted the instrument to our extensive territory, and a provision for amendments furnished a remedy against existing defects. Of the latter the omission to secure specifically and adequately the individual natural rights of men against the exercise of arbitrary power was the most important--a defect in respect to which a large majority of the Anti-Federalists were, for reasons frequently referred to, most sensitive. The Constitution was