A central government, constructed on the basis of their democratic creed, would have been a government whose powers were smaller, more rigid, and more inefficiently distributed than those granted under our Federal Constitution--as may be seen from the various state constitutions subsequently written under Jeffersonian influence.

When they obtained power either they should have been faithful to their convictions and tried to modify the Federal machinery in accordance therewith, or they should have modified their ideas in order to make them square with their behavior.

But instead of seriously and candidly considering the meaning of their own actions, they opened their mouths wide enough to swallow their own past and then deliberately shut their eyes.

They accepted the national organization as a fact and as a condition of national safety; but they rejected it as a lesson in political wisdom, and as an implicit principle of political action.

By so doing they began that career of intellectual lethargy, superficiality, and insincerity which ever since has been characteristic of official American political thought.
This lack of intellectual integrity on the part of the American democracy both falsified the spirit in which our institutions had originated, and seriously compromised their future success.