The leaders very generally assumed, as they often expressed it, that society was _naturally_ divided into the few and the many—the educated minority, and the laboring majority—and as such was the actual social condition of the population as well as the mental habits of the leaders, it is not at all surprising that they sought to found a government on such a basis. The agricultural population of the Northern and Middle States were then very ignorant indeed, when compared with the present. Feudalism had not been long overthrown in England or Europe, and the serf transformed into the peasant, and though the American farmer of 1776 was a great advance over the latter, he still largely partook of that general apathy, stolidity, and ignorance which in all times, until now, in our own favored land, have distinguished the tillers of the soil. The large population at the North otherwise employed, the mechanics, artisans, shop-keepers, laborers, etc., were generally, as in the mother country, without representation in the provincial legislatures, and as the interests of the educated classes, the capitalists, merchants, lawyers, divines, etc., were supposed to be, and were in fact, in conflict with those of the former, they always desired strong governments to hold them in order. Indeed, the idea of mob ascendency, of anarchy, the wild rule of the rabble, was the constant terror of the Northern leaders, and in all the arguments of Hamilton, the Adamses, etc., this was put prominently forward. Their rhetorical formula was always the same—“the rule of the uneducated mass will degenerate into license and anarchy, from which the country can only be saved by the strong hand of some military chief, who, first a dictator, will finally don the purple, and the _rôle_ so often played in the Old World will be repeated in the New.” This notion and this reasoning was legitimate—the consistent result of the social condition as well as the offspring of the inherited traditions of the Northern mind. The capitalists, all those who inherited wealth, the “well-born” and educated class, in short, the few who had the power in their hands, naturally sought, to preserve it and to build up a strong government; which, while it specially benefited themselves, should always be able to “preserve order”—that is, while founded on existing social distinctions, was sufficiently strong to repress the efforts of the multitude to change the social condition. They had no negroes, no natural substratum in the social elements or natural distinctions of society. They had nothing before their eyes but the results of chance, of the accidents of life—nothing but wealth and education—nothing, in short, but the _débris_ of the old societies—those class distinctions which in the Old World constitute the basis of the political and social order, and their mental habits, their opinions, their notions of government and its uses, were, of course, in accord with these things, and their minds were