We are content to say with Webster that the prosperity of American institutions depends upon the unity and inseparability of individual and local liberties and a national union.

We are content to declare that the United States must remain somehow a free and a united country, because there can be no complete unity without liberty and no salutary liberty outside of a Union.

But the difficulties with this phrase, its implications and consequences, we do not sufficiently consider.

It is enough that we have found an optimistic formula wherewith to unite the divergent aspects of the Republican, and Federalist doctrines.
We must begin, consequently, with critical accounts of the ideas both of Jefferson and of Hamilton; and we must seek to discover wherein each of these sets of ideas was right, and wherein each was wrong; in what proportions they were subsequently combined in order to form "our noble national theory," and what were the advantages, the limitations, and the effects of this combination.

I shall not disguise the fact that, on the whole, my own preferences are on the side of Hamilton rather than of Jefferson.