The political feelings which lay nearest to the hearts of the great body of the people, as well during our colonial condition as in the States after the declaration and establishment of Independence, and of the strength of which I have referred to such striking and oft-repeated illustrations, were those of veneration and affection for their local governments as safeguards of their liberties and adequate to most of their wants; endeared to them as their refuge from the persecutions of arbitrary power, and hallowed by the perils and triumphs of the Revolution. Allied to these feelings, and nearly co-extensive with them in point of duration, was a distrust, at both periods, on the part of the masses, of what they called an overshadowing general government. When to these sources of opposition to the views of the party which had arrayed itself against the government of the Confederation is added the natural and deeply seated hostility of those who dissented from its views in respect to hereditary government in any form, and the suspicion of a reserved preference for such, or at least for kindred institutions, we cannot be at a loss in accounting for the origin of the first two great parties which sprang up and divided the country so soon after the establishment of our Independence. But the names by which these parties were distinguished are, it must be admitted, not so intelligible. The name of Anti-Federalists was strangely enough given by their opponents to those who advocated the continuance of the Union upon the principles which prevailed in its establishment, and according to which it was regarded as a Federal League or Alliance of Free States, upon equal terms, founded upon a compact (the Articles of Confederation) by which its conditions were regulated,--to be represented by a general Congress, authorized to consider and decide all questions appertaining to the interests of the alliance and committed to its charge, without power either to act upon the people directly or to apply force to the States, or otherwise to compel a compliance with its decrees, and without any guarantee for their execution other than the good faith of the parties to the compact. On the other hand the name of Federalists was assumed, and, what is still more extraordinary, retained by those who desired to reduce the State governments, by the conjunction of which the Federal Union had been formed, to the condition of corporations to be intrusted with the performance of those offices only for the discharge of which a new general government might think them the appropriate functionaries; to convert the States, not perhaps in name, but practically and substantially, into one consolidated body politic, and to establish over it a government which should, at the least, be rendered independent and effective by the possession of ample powers to devise, adopt, and execute such measures as it might deem best adapted to common defense and general welfare.