"What the country now needs in order to save it is a revival of the Jeffersonian democracy, with the principles of government and rules of administration, and with the high standard of official morality which were established by the political revolution of 1800. At that time the infant institutions of the republic were imperilled by the same evil tendencies which have to-day attained a larger development. The demoralizations of war--a spirit of gambling adventure, engendered by false systems of public finance; a grasping centralism, absorbing all functions from the local authorities, and assuming to control the industries of individuals by largesses to favored classes from the public treasury of moneys wrung from the body of the people by taxation--were then, as now, characteristics of the period. The party which swayed the government, though embracing many elevated characters, was dominated, as an organization, by the ideas of its master-spirit, Alexander Hamilton. Himself personally pure, he nevertheless believed that our American people must be governed, if not by force, at least by appeals to the selfish interests of classes, in all the forms of corrupt influence. I recently met here--in the birthplace of Albert Gallatin--a son of that great man, and himself a distinguished American. Speaking in the light of the unsullied traditions of that day, as well as of its public history, he said that the jobbery and corruption and laxity of official morals were as great, proportionally, then as now. If this be a true judgment, the reaction which was effected and which gave us half a century of comparatively pure administration is an encouragement that official morals and public life may be again lifted from degradation. As the means of the reaction of 1800, Thomas Jefferson founded and organized the Democratic party. He set up anew the broken foundations of governmental power. He stayed the advancing centralism. He restored the rights of the States and the localities. He repressed the meddling of government in the concerns of private business, remitting the management of the industries of the country to the domain of the individual judgment and conscience. He not only brought the administration into conformity with principles which lessen the occasions and the motives for corruption, but he enforced, by precept and by example, purity and disinterestedness in official life. He refused to appoint relatives to office. He declined all presents. He refrained, while in the public service, from all enterprises to increase his private fortune. The immense ascendency over the public opinion of the country acquired by Mr. Jefferson--the complete triumph of the party he formed and led, the acceptance at length by the whole people of him as the highest political authority--shaped the course of government in the United States for half a century. That period will stand in all history as the golden age of the republic.