With the authentic record before us of the issue, the contest, the result, and the efforts on the part of the defeated party to recover the ground it had lost, the supposition seems preposterous that our party divisions had their origin in the circumstances that occurred on the appointment of General Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of our Revolutionary army, as is alleged by a son of General Hamilton, in his history of the life of his father. Of the same character, though not quite so unreasonable, are the attempts which have been made by several to find their origin in the Federal Convention. That body did indeed present an occasion for the application of different opinions to the original formation of the Federal Constitution, but those opinions grew out of conflicting tenets which had divided the country into parties long before, and they were not then determined either way, but compromised upon grounds of expediency by a result which was not in point of fact satisfactory to any side, but acquiesced in by a majority obtained from the ranks of both. The proposition of President John Quincy Adams in his Inaugural Address, tracing their rise to the opposing sides taken by the people of the United States, as between England and France, and their final discontinuance to the disastrous career and termination of the French Revolution, would seem to be not less wide of the mark. The continuance of the two great parties of the country in the same state, in respect to the principles they espoused and the characters and dispositions of those who composed them, for more than half a century and for a quarter of a century before his address was delivered, is not to be denied. If it was even supposed possible that an intelligent and high spirited people like our own, with traditions and a history so eventful, and with domestic interests so important, could have been arrayed in hostile political opinions and party divisions by the influence of purely foreign questions, the continuance of those divisions in the same form and spirit for so many years after all pretense of the operation of such an influence had ceased would of itself be sufficient to refute the theory. But the objections to it are too numerous, too conclusive in their character, and too obvious to make it necessary to press them farther. The French Revolution had sufficiently developed itself to weaken, if not extinguish, the solicitude of the Republicans for its success, (who, with their leader, Thomas Jefferson, regarded its excesses with abhorrence,) before they expelled John Adams from the Presidency for the aid and sanction which he gave to Hamilton's violations of the Constitution, and his son, John Quincy Adams, was twenty-eight years afterwards driven from power for the same cause and by the same party, a party which he supposed had ceased to exist for some thirty years previous. It was by his latitudinarian avowals in respect to the