America 755
ated, the establishment of a bank under federal charter, the introduction of excises
and import duties to produce revenue for debt service, the encouragement of for-
eign trade to provide customs revenues at a high level, were all designed to serve
his political as well as economic ends—to build up the power and credit of the new
central government, and to encourage men of wealth to lend, invest, or speculate
with their money.
If such purely internal questions had been the only sources of disagreement, it is
possible that the fortunes of the new republic would have been worse than they
proved to be. Hamilton’s program lacked popular appeal. It was not easy to under-
stand, and it offered nothing for the ordinary citizen to become enthusiastic about.
It emphasized the differences of class interest. However national in design, it was
highly regional in the feelings which it elicited; it made most of its friends in the
northeast, and most of its enemies in the south and west. Division of opinion and
interest there was bound to be; the question, in a “new nation,” was what form such
a division should take. Quarrels between elites without popular following might be
ruinous, especially if geographically localized. They might lead to a disintegration
of the existing union into a plurality of smaller republics, as happened in the great
vice- royalties of the Spanish empire a generation later. They might lead to de-
mands for a new constitution, and replacement of one constitution by another, as
happened in France, until no constitution commanded enough respect to enjoy the
advantages of legitimacy and authority. Or the divisions might take the form of
political parties, each having members scattered throughout the country, each of-
fering a means of connection between leaders and popular following, each provid-
ing symbols that could arouse enthusiasm and serve as a basis of organized if not
always very informed opinion, and each willing, in the last analysis, to surrender
the powers of government into the hands of the other without rebellion, revolution
and violence.
The remarkable thing is that the divisions in the United States took this latter
form, the form of political parties, and in particular the form of a two- party sys-
tem. In producing the two parties, as in the constitutional convention of 1787 and
the Revolution before it, the Americans displayed a good deal of political original-
ity, since there had never been parties of this kind before, simultaneously popular
and governmental, at work both in the national capital and in local taverns and
clubs, and brought into existence to take part in really contested elections.^12 The
parties made possible a mass participation in the exercise of public powers as laid
down in the constitution. They made it possible also for a free government to func-
tion successfully, if a free government be defined as one which can tolerate oppo-
nents, and presumptive successors in office, without fears for its own existence.
It is widely agreed, among those who have most studied the matter, that the two
American parties, and hence the beginnings of a two- party system, were produced
in the United States by reactions to the European war and the French Revolution.
The paradox, therefore, is that the ideological differences aroused in the United
States, which became very heated, and the actual dangers of subservience to for-
12 The theme of Chambers, op.cit., to which I am much indebted.