Or, in other words, the federalists believed that the more the central power was enlarged the greater the scope and strength of the federal government—the more certain were the States to be kept from disunion and the restless multitudes from anarchy, while Jefferson and his party believed that this assumption of power in the central government would result in the overthrow of the government itself if there was no other way of obtaining redress and of preserving on the part of the States and the people of the States the liberties which they fought for in 1776. Such was the great civil contest that sprung up under the administration of Washington, but which was constantly restrained by the presence of that great man, who, without any very decided leanings as regarded the parties to it, was, moreover, eminently practical and earnestly disposed to favor conciliation and peace rather than commit himself to the abstract opinions of either side. It was only, therefore, during the succeeding administration of Adams that this fundamental conflict of ideas—this conflict which involved the very foundations of government itself, and which, back of the immediate actors that figured in the scene, originated in the different mental habits that spring of necessity from different social conditions, reached its culmination and prepared the way for that final solution which the great civil revolution of 1800 afterwards accomplished. The federalists, or, more properly, the centralists, had construed the Constitution in a way to make the government in practice substantially what they believed it should have been in theory. They had adopted the British system of finance, had created a national debt and a national bank, which, as in England, was to be the agency for the deposit and disbursement of the public revenue, and, from the necessities of the case, a vast and overshadowing monopoly which was to hold the credit of the States, and of every individual in the States, at its mercy. In fact, the States were rapidly sinking into mere dependencies and subject provinces of the vast and overshadowing power of the central government, which, not content with its usurpations over the States—tending, in practice, to almost obliterate the lines of State sovereignty—even sought to strike down the liberty of the individual citizen, and in its alien and sedition laws to exercise absolute powers. These laws authorized the president to imprison and punish citizens and others as his fears or caprices might dictate, with few, if any, greater safeguards for the citizen than in absolute governments of the Old World.