ABSTRACT
The economic rivalries of which Walton Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were the political symbols emanated from no struggle between propertyless proletarians, on one hand, and the owners of land and capital. The question of the Supreme Court's power was not one of the issues that divided the founding fathers into hostile political parties at the end of the Revolutionary War. Even though the plan to reform the Supreme Court is no longer a political issue it calls up for re-examination not merely the founding fathers' views of judicial control but their fundamental economic and political ideas. The self-made democrat and spokesman for the colonial cause on the eve of the American Revolution, entered politics in his adopted Pennsylvania as a leader of the back-country yeomanry and small men against the wealthy town gentry. In England, middle-class democracy took the form of a struggle of the industrial capitalists, supported by the wage-earners, to wrest political power from the nobility.
