The Federalists repaid their opponents with a no less exaggerated fear of their principles and intentions, regarding them as Jacobins and _sans culottes_, who desired to destroy whatever was good and to produce bloodshed and anarchy. Party spirit ran to heights seldom reached since. Partisan abuse outstripped anything since. It was an additional misfortune that the questions at issue were delicate questions of foreign policy and international law. It is a great evil in a republic that parties should divide by sympathy with two foreign nations, and it is the greatest evil possible that they should not believe in each other’s loyalty to the existing constitution. The deeper movement which was stirring to affect the general attitude or standpoint from which the Constitution was viewed (a matter, of course, of the first importance under a written constitution), and which was changing the constitutional republic into a democratic republic, did not escape the observation of the most sagacious men of the earliest days. Fisher Ames wrote to Wolcott in 1800: “The fact really is, that over and above the difficulties of sustaining a free government, and the freer the more difficult, there is a want of accordance between our system and the state of our public opinion. The government is republican; opinion is essentially democratic. Either events will raise public opinion high enough to support our government, or public opinion will pull down the government to its own level.” The fact was that the government could not, under the system, long remain above the level of public opinion. The Federalists, assisted by the prestige of Washington’s name, held it there for twelve years; but they probably never, on any of the party issues, even with a restricted suffrage, had a majority of the voters. Dating the rise of parties from the time of Jay’s Treaty, they had a majority of the House of Representatives only under the excitement of French insult in 1798.