Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[86] with national and State affairs and practical politics. This country is to continue certainly for years in accordance with the theories of Hamilton, whose great genius and clear reasoning formulated a system of government; while the philosophical lucubrations of Jefferson are the best instructions as to the mutual relations of its citizens in all conditions of life.

In a word, the government of Hamilton, clothed with every necessary power and inhibited only from oppressing either the masses or the individual, should protect the rights and carry out the equality under the law of each and every citizen of the republic, if either should be limited or injuriously or fraudulently interfered with either by the permission or by the enactment of the governments of the States. Therefore I declare my political convictions to be these:--As to the powers and duties of the government of the United States, I am a Hamiltonian Federalist. As to the rights and privileges of the citizen, I am a Jeffersonian Democrat. I hold that the full and only end of government is to care for the people in their rights and liberties, and that they have the right and privilege to call on either the State, or the United States, or both, to protect them in equality of powers, equality of rights, equality of privileges, and equality of burdens under the law, by carefully and energetically enforced provisions of equal laws justly applicable to every citizen.

I have deemed it my duty to myself and to my readers to state these, my conclusions, for they have tinged if not permeated every public aim of my life, and every private aim also, I hope.

Coming to Lowell at the early age of less than a dozen years, when it was a small manufacturing town, I became a part of the beginning. But the town had grown so marvellously that in 1836 it had become the second city of New England, and the largest city in the country whose business was solely manufacturing. The people, women and children as well as men, were engaged in daily labor in mills whose machinery was driven by what was then the largest improved single water power in the country. This city had also a singular peculiarity regarding the conduct of its operations. All the capital employed, with the exception of the merest trifle, was owned by non-residents.

The management of that capital was in the form of several large corporations, in each of which was a very considerable community of