[3] This contradiction between names and principles was obvious even to intelligent foreigners. The French minister Fauchet, in his famous despatch to his government (the publication of which worked the downfall of Edmund Randolph, Washington's Secretary of State) alluding to political parties in America, speaks of the whimsical contrast between their names, Federal and Anti-Federal, and their real opinions;--the former aiming with all their power to annihilate federalism, while the latter were striving to preserve it. Between these parties, thenceforth distinguished by the misnomers of Federalists and Anti-Federalists, there was, from the close of the war to the establishment of the present government, an uninterrupted succession of partisan conflicts, in which the whole country participated. They grew, for the most part, out of propositions to take from the State governments the rights of regulating commerce and of levying and collecting impost duties, and for the call of a Convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. The first two of these propositions were introduced by the Federalists, and for six years vigorously supported by their party, with Hamilton at its head; and, although advocated by Madison whilst he was in Congress, such was the strength of the Anti-Federal party in that body and in the States that they were not able to carry either. Advances were occasionally made in respect to imposts, but these were so restricted as to the officers by whom the duties should be collected, whether State or Federal, and in regard to the application of the money when collected, that the movers of the principal measure considered its value so much impaired that they declined to push it further under the existing circumstances. A distrust of the motives of the Federal leaders, and an apprehension that they designed to employ the powers asked for in the establishment of a strong and absorbing general government, capable of becoming, and which the Anti-Federalists feared would, in the progress of time, become, disposed to practice a tyranny upon the people, as oppressive as that from which the Revolution had relieved them, with the suspicion already referred to, that many would not be willing to stop at that point, were doubtless the true causes of these otherwise unaccountable failures. The accounts which have been brought down to us of the proceedings of public bodies, and of appeals to the people, through different channels, abundantly sustain this assumption. These, in a work like this, can only be glanced at.