At the same time, he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.

A doctrinaire in society was to him an abomination.

These Jeffersonian doctrinaires were men who at certain crises, in certain countries, might have rendered great service to the cause of liberty and humanity; but their influence in America was on the whole distinctly evil, save that, by a series of accidents, they became the especial champions of the westward extension of the nation, and in consequence were identified with a movement which was all-essential to the national well-being.