s of Washington, and in view of
his manifest superiority this advantage was not needed. Perhaps it was
in a different way a sign of self-respect that the new republic should
at last turn from this tradition, and take boldly from the ranks a
strong and ill-trained leader, to whom all European precedent--and,
indeed, all other precedent, counted for nothing. In Jackson, moreover,
there first appeared upon our national stage the since familiar figure
of the self-made man. Other presidents had sprung from a modest origin,
but nobody had made an especial point of it. Nobody had urged Washington
for office because he had been a surveyor's lad; nobody had voted for
Adams because stately old ladies designated him as "that cobbler's son."
But when Jackson came into office the people had just had almost a
surfeit of regular training in their chief magistrates. There was a
certain zest in the thought of a change, and the nation certainly had
it.

It must be remembered that Jackson was in many ways far above the
successive modern imitators who have posed in his image. He was narrow,
ignorant, violent, unreasonable; he punished his enemies and rewarded
his friends. But he was, on the other hand--and his worst opponents
hardly denied it--chaste, honest, truthful, and sincere. It was not
commonly charged upon him that he enriched himself at the public
expense, or that he deliberately invented falsehoods. And as he was for
a time more bitterly hated than anyone who ever occupied his high
office, we may be very sure that these things would have been charged
had it been possible. In this respect the contrast was enormous between
Jackson and his imitators, and it explains his prolonged influence. He
never was found out or exposed before the world, because there was
nothing to detect or unveil; his merits and demerits were as visible as
his long, narrow, firmly set features, or as the old military stock that
encircled his neck. There he was, always fully revealed; everybody could
see him; the people might take him or leave him--and they never left
him.

Moreover, there was, after the eight years of Monroe and the four years
of Adams, an immense popular demand for something piquant and even
amusing, and this quality they always had from Jackson. There was
nothing in the least melodramatic about him; he never posed or
attitudinized--it would have required too much patience; but he was
always piquant. There was formerly a good deal of discu