Nor ought we to be impatient with those who assert that both
America and Jefferson were wrong, since we cannot yet claim for either a final
and indubitable triumph. In France the politics with which he was in the
warmest sympathy resulted in organized massacre and fell Bonaparte; and the
party which he led in the United States issued, at the South, in armed
rebellion, and, in some portions of the North, in the Rule of the Thief. We
must face these facts, and understand their meaning. They no more prove that
Jefferson and Madison, Lafayette and Paine, were wrong, than the Inquisition
and the religious wars prove that the maxims of Jesus are false. They are only
illustrations of the familiar fact, that the progress of truth and justice is
slow and very difficult. They show that no country is ripe for equal rights until
a majority of its inhabitants are so far sharers in its better civilization,
that their votes can be obtained by arguments addressed to the understanding.
We must now accept it as an axiom, that universal suffrage,
where one-third of the voters cannot read the language of the country they
inhabit, tends to place the scoundrel class at the summit of affairs. We see
that it has done so in France, in the Southern States, in New York, and in
Philadelphia.
But such virtue is there in the Jeffersonian methods, that,
even in those places, we find them our best resource. In New York, a mass
meeting and its Committee of Seventy, in two years, suppressed the worst of the
public stealing. In the South, the freedman rages for the spelling-book. In
Pennsylvania, the reign of the scoundrel draws to an end ; and it is everywhere
evident, that nothing is farther from the intention of the American people than
to submit to lawless or lawful spoliation.
It is even possible that the party which Jefferson founded —
such vitality did he breathe into it—may again, instructed by defeat and
purified in the furnace of affliction, deliver the country from the evils which
perplex and threaten it, employing the only expedient that will ever long
succeed in a free country, the expedient of being right. Jefferson’s principles
will do this, if his party does not. A government simple, inexpensive, and
strong, that shall protect all rights, including those of posterity, and let
all interests protect themselves, assuming no functions except those which the
Constitution distinctly assigns it, — these are the principles which Jefferson
restored in 1801, and to which the future of the country can be safely trusted.
Parton was well respected in his time but just a reminder, the voters he reminds his reader about were the Irish, Italians, African Americans, and many others often detested by what he refers to as Democrats, the followers of Jefferson. History is all too often defined by the writers and popularizer.
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