This was essential to a proper respect in the eyes
of other nations.
This national spirit, if the Administration had remained in the hands
of the Federalists, might have grown too rapidly for the maintenance
of a proper equilibrium. Hamilton, unhampered by an Adams, would have
made the United States a party to European alliances, dangerous to
American originality and American neutrality. Self-government would
have assumed some form of European imitation. Drawn into the Napoleonic
wars as allies of Britain, nothing but a miracle could have saved them
from the legitimacy-restoring Congress of Vienna. What changes in
American history might have followed! The desire of Britain for the
Louisiana country, the claim of Spain to the Mississippi below the
Ohio, silenced but not abandoned after 1783, the necessity for
neutrality as a basis for the Monroe Doctrine, and the development of
America free from the burden of a war-basis defence, must be considered
in this connection. So many are the conditions and menaces that
speculation pauses at predicting the results if the great law of
reaction had not manifested itself at this juncture.
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