This union was in other respects composed of very discordant materials. It consisted, on the one hand, of men and the descendants of men on whose hearts the fires of persecution had burned a hatred of royalty too deep to be erased and too zealous to be trifled with; of men who were at the same time too conversant with human nature to allow themselves to believe that the love of power and the proneness to its abuse were confined to its hereditary possessors, and who were therefore anxious to restrict grants of authority to their public functionaries to the lowest point consistent with good government, and to subject what they did grant to the most stringent responsibilities. They continued, also, to cherish the same preference for their local organizations, and to entertain the same distrust of an overshadowing central government, for which the great body of the people had long been distinguished. They were men whose highest ambition and desire for themselves and the country was that it should have a plain, simple, and cheap government for the management of the affairs of the Confederacy, republican in its construction and democratic in its spirit,--a government that should, as far as practicable, be deprived of the power of creating artificial distinctions in society, and of corrupting and thus subverting the independence of the people by the possession of a redundant patronage. Such a government had long been the subject of their meditations, and they braved the hazards and encountered the hardships of the Revolutionary contest for the opportunity of establishing it. The Revolutionary brotherhood by which the recognition of our Independence was enforced, contained, on the other hand, men respectable in numbers, and distinguished by talent, public service, and high social position, who dissented from many (I may say from most) of these views, and who regarded them as Utopian in themselves, or as too contracted for the exigencies of the public service. This difference in the opinions of men who had been engaged in such a contest was all but unavoidable, and was never absent from any political struggle of sufficient importance to be compared with it. It results, besides those which have been indicated as peculiar to our own condition and history, from simple but potent causes of universal operation, such as diversities in social condition, in education, in the influence and tendencies of previous pursuits, and in individual character and temperament, producing diversities of views on such occasions.