Hamilton and his party, on the contrary, held that the financial policy they adopted was not only the wisest that was possible under the circumstances, but that the consequences likely to follow—the consolidation of power and prestige of the central government—would be of the greatest possible value to the people. Indeed, the old contest between Massachusetts and Virginia—the conflict of ideas—the warfare of widely different mental habits which preceded and ushered in the government were renewed and accompanied by a bitterness of spirit quite unknown in the former case. Hamilton, impelled by the opinions of the North, assumed in practice, if not in theory always, that the central government sprung from the collective or the American people instead of the people of the States, and was almost unlimited in its powers, and he doubtless believed that the more extended its powers, the safer and more stable would become the country and the more prosperous the people. He had failed to obtain such a government as he especially desired—a government after the English model—republican in form but aristocratic in fact, a government based on those artificial distinctions which the mental habits of the North were accustomed to regard as the only safe foundation, and now in power, with the prestige of the great name of Washington to support his policy, he doubtless believed himself a patriot, and as performing vital service to his country and to posterity, when he thus construed the Constitution and consolidated the powers of the federal system. Indeed, the fear of the people—of a reckless and disorderly multitude—was the abiding sentiment of the great northern leaders, and the consolidation, power, and grandeur of a central government that should restrain them was the object of all their efforts. Thus, the very objects the federalists aimed at—doubtless from patriotic motives, for there being no laws of primogeniture there was no permanent class to be benefited by their policy—were the very things that Mr. Jefferson and his friends contemplated as the greatest danger to the country. Hamilton desired to construe the Constitution in a way to build up an enormous central power that should hold in check the tendencies to disruption and disorder, while Jefferson believed that the greater the assumption and the consolidation of power in the federal system the greater the danger to the freedom of the States and to the people.