e deluge of the spoils system burst over our national
politics. Sixteen years later, Mr. Buchanan said in a public speech
that General Taylor would be faithless to the Whig party if he did not
proscribe Democrats. So high the deluge had risen which has ravaged and
wasted our politics ever since, and the danger will be stayed only
when every President, leaning upon the law, shall stand fast where John
Quincy Adams stood.

But the debate continued during the whole Jackson administration. In
the Senate and on the stump, in elaborate reports and popular speeches,
Webster, Calhoun, and Clay, the great political chiefs of their time,
sought to alarm the country with the dangers of patronage. Sargent S.
Prentiss, in the House of Representatives, caught up and echoed the cry
under the administration of Van Buren. But the country refused to be
alarmed. As the Yankee said of the Americans at the battle of
White Plains, where they were beaten, "The fact is, as far as I can
understand, our folks did n't seem to take no sort of interest in that
battle." The reason that the country took no sort of interest in the
discussion of the evils of patronage was evident. It believed the
denunciation to be a mere party cry, a scream of disappointment and
impotence from those who held no places and controlled no patronage.
It heard the leaders of the opposition fiercely arraigning the
administration for proscription and universal wrong-doing, but it was
accustomed by its English tradition and descent always to hear the
Tories cry that the Constitution was in danger when the Whigs were in
power, and the Whigs under a Tory administration to shout that all was
lost. It heard the uproar like the old lady upon her first railroad
journey, who sat serene amid the wreck of a collision, and when asked
if she was much hurt, looked over her spectacles and answered,
blandly, "Hurt? Why, I supposed they always stopped so in this kind of
travelling." The feeling that the denunciation was only a part of the
game of politics, and no more to be accepted as a true statement than
Snug the joiner as a true lion, was confirmed by the fact that when the
Whig opposition came into power with President Harrison, it adopted the
very policy which under Democratic administration it had strenuously
denounced as fatal. The pressure for place was even greater than it had
been ten years before, and although Mr. Webster as Secretary of State
maintained his consistency by putti