As a corollary from this fundamental assumption, Hamilton devoted all his great abilities to the development of as strong a central government as possible. He would remove power as completely as might be from the hands of the common people and place it in those who had inherited or acquired wealth and position. For this purpose he deliberately set about to tie the wealthy classes to government by his Funding Act, by the creation of manufactures, by a protective tariff, by the establishment of banks, and in other ways. He felt that human nature had always been the same and would not change. Public education did not interest him. His one interest was the establishment of a strong government in strong hands, and he evidently felt that a smattering of book knowledge, such as our people even yet get in grade and high schools, would not alter their characters and make them safe depositaries for political power. In fact, and this is an important point to note in his system, the development of the industrial state would tend to make the people at large even less capable than in his day by creating, as it has done, a vast mass of mere wage-earners, floating city dwellers, on the one hand, while it built up his wealthy class on the other. The great mass of the people, he reasoned, would always have to be governed in any case, and the more powerful and influential the wealthy could be made, the[Pg 90] stronger would they be for governing. Out of these simple assumptions, the banks, the vast “implied powers” of the central government, the funding of the national debt, the rise of a manufacturing industry, and the formation of a tariff designed not merely to protect infant industries but to create a dependence of wealth upon government favor, were developed as clearly and logically as a theorem in Euclid. Thus, very briefly, and perhaps a trifle crudely, we have stated the real bases of Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism. Their whole systems of government sprang logically from their differing premises. Jefferson trusted the common man. Hamilton deeply distrusted him. That was a very clear-cut issue from 1790 to 1800, and both men, and the people themselves, recognized it as such. Stupendous consequences would follow from the success in practical politics at that time of either of those theories of human nature. For the first decade of our national life Hamilton beat Jefferson in practical politics, and in a very real sense created the United States as we know it to-day, a vast manufacturing nation with its Federal government eating up all the state governments like an Aaron’s rod, with its trusts and its money power and its Chinese wall of a protective tariff, and all the rest. There is no doubt of the strength of the present government. There is no doubt of the support it derives from the wealthy classes. There is no doubt of the colossal success of the industrial experiment as a creator of wealth.