The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness.

American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation.

The adoption by Jefferson and the Republicans of the political structure of their opponents is of an importance hardly inferior to that of the adoption of the Constitution by the states.

Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved.

The majority of men cannot be made disinterested for life by exhortation, by religious services, by any expenditure of subsidized works, or even by grave and manifest public need. They can be made permanently unselfish only by being helped to become disinterested in their individual purposes. In the complete democracy a man must in some way be made to serve the nation in the very act of contributing to his own individual fulfillment. Not until his personal action is dictated by disinterested motives can there be any such harmony between private and public interests.

Women ... are completely alone, though they were born and bred upon this soil, as if they belonged to another class in creation.

The Constitution was the expression not only of a political faith, but also of political fears. It was wrought both as the organ of the national interest and as the bulwark of certain individual and local rights.