In their opposition to the consolidation of the national organization,
the pioneers believed that they were defending the citadel of their
democratic creed. Democracy meant to them, not only equal opportunities
secured by law, but an approximately equal standing among individual
citizens, and an approximately equal division of the social and economic
fruits. They realized vaguely that national consolidation brought with
it organization, and organization depended for its efficiency upon a
classification of individual citizens according to ability, knowledge,
and competence. In a nationalized state, it is the man of exceptional
position, power, responsibility, and training who is most likely to be
representative and efficient, whereas in a thoroughly democratic state,
as they conceived it, the average man was the representative citizen and
the fruitful type. Nationalization looked towards the introduction and
perpetuation of a political, social, and financial hierarchy. They
opposed it consequently, on behalf of the "plain people"; and they even
reached the conclusion that the contemporary political system was to
some extent organized for the benefit of special interests. They
discovered in the fiscal and administrative organization the presence of
discrimination against the average man. The National Bank was an example
of special economic privileges. The office-holding clique was an example
of special political privileges. Jackson and his followers declared war
on these sacrilegious anomalies in the temple of democracy. Thus the
only innovations which the pioneers sought to impose on our national
political system were by way of being destructive. They uprooted a
national institution which had existed, with but one brief interruption,
for more than forty years; and they entirely altered the tradition of
appointment in the American civil service. Both of these destructive
achievements throw a great deal of light upon their unconscious
tendencies and upon their explicit convictions, and will help us to
understand the value and the limitation of the positive contribution
which the pioneers made to the fullness of the American democratic idea.

The National Bank was the institution by virtue of which Hamilton sought
to secure a stable national currency and an efficient national fiscal
agent; and the Bank, particularly under its second charter, had
undoubtedly been a useful and economical piece of financial machinery.
The Repu