"They have reduced the army and navy to what is barely necessary. They are disarming executive patronage and preponderances by putting down one-half the offices of the United States which are no longer necessary. These economies have enabled them to suppress all the internal taxes and still to make such provision for the payment of their public debt as to discharge that in eighteen years. They are opening the doors of hospitality to fugitives from the oppressions of other countries; and we have suppressed all those public forms and ceremonies which tended to familiarize the public eye to the harbingers of another form of government." Thus had democracy, in Jefferson's opinion, at last come into its own. CHAPTER XV STRICT CONSTRUCTION AN IMPOSSIBILITY Sixty years of almost uninterrupted Republican-Democratic administration were inaugurated with Thomas Jefferson in 1801. This period was auspiciously begun by correcting the abuses wrought in the National Government by the twelve years of Federalism. It was ended by the faithful adherence of the party to the slavery system, to which it was bound both by geographic strength and the principles of individualism. The period was apparently long enough to allow the party to give the Union such a bias toward decentralisation that it could never recover its power and prestige. How the compelling laws of organised society, the needs of the people in their conquest of the wilderness, and the necessity of providing for the common defence and the general welfare prevented such an unfortunate consummation makes up the middle period of the story of the United States.