The Anti-Federal party represented very fairly the ideas and feelings that prevailed with the masses during the Revolution. These, as we have described, having been deeply rooted by the persecutions suffered by Puritan, Huguenot, Hussite, and Dutch ancestors, and, however crude and unsystematized at first, having been gradually stimulated into maturity and shape by the persevering injustice of the mother country, became political opinions of the most tenacious and enduring character. At the moment of which we are speaking, alarm in respect to the character of the General Government about to be established, with increased attachments to those of the States, were predominant feelings in the Anti-Federal mind, and closed it against a dispassionate consideration of the Constitution submitted to their choice. The local governments were entitled to all the regard which had been cherished for them by the Anti-Federalists and by their political predecessors under the colonial system; neither were the dangers which threatened them overrated. Hamilton could not tolerate the idea that they should be continued otherwise than as corporations, with very limited powers. Morris, in his usual rough and strong way, was for "drawing their teeth," as I have already quoted him; and even the temperate Madison was in favor of giving the General Government a direct negative upon all their laws,--a proposition which, though not so humiliating as Hamilton's, or so harshly expressed as that of Morris, would have been far more fatal to their future usefulness. Standing now on the vantage-ground of experience, no sensible man can fail to see that the State governments would have perished under the treatment thus proposed for them, nor can any such man doubt the immense advantage they have been and still are to our system. A short reflection upon what has been accomplished through their agency, and upon what our condition would probably have been if they had been blotted out of the system, as was virtually desired in most influential quarters, must satisfy candid and intelligent minds of the fatal unsoundness of the policy proposed. The States would under it have been governed as her numerous colonies were governed by Rome, and a comparison of our present condition with what it must have been under the satraps of a consolidated federal government, will cause every patriotic heart to rejoice at our escape from the latter. For that escape we are largely indebted to the old Anti-Federal party. They stood out longest and strongest in behalf of the State governments, after the establishment of our Independence; and although they failed in other respects, they made impressions upon the public mind which have never been effaced, and for which we owe them a debt of gratitude. Their motives, as is usual in political collisions, were misrepresented; they were spoken of as men of contracted views, of narrow prejudices; and