g in the condition and history of the two nations
is calculated to inspire sentiments of mutual respect and to carry
conviction to the minds of both that it is their policy to preserve the
most cordial relations." It may also be of some interest to quote the
verdict of an English statesman, who, differing from Jackson in all
those things in which an aristocratic politician must necessarily differ
from the tribune of a democracy, had nevertheless something of the same
symbolic and representative national character and something of the same
hold upon his fellow-countrymen. A letter from Van Buren, at that time
representing the United States at the Court of St. James's, to Jackson
reports Palmerston as saying to him that "a very strong impression had
been made here of the dangers which this country had to apprehend from
your elevation, but that they had experienced better treatment at your
hands than they had done from any of your predecessors."

So enormous was Jackson's popularity that, if he had been the ambitious
Caesarist that his enemies represented, he could in all probability have
safely violated the Washington-Jefferson precedent and successfully
sought election a third time. But he showed no desire to do so. He had
undergone the labours of a titan for twelve eventful and formative
years. He was an old man; he was tired. He may well have been glad to
rest for what years were left to him of life in his old frontier State,
which he had never ceased to love. He survived his Presidency by nine
years. Now and then his voice was heard on a public matter, and,
whenever it was heard, it carried everywhere a strange authority as if
it were the people speaking. But he never sought public office again.

Jackson's two periods of office mark a complete revolution in American
institutions; he has for the Republic as it exists to day the
significance of a second founder. From that period dates the frank
abandonment of the fiction of the Electoral College as an independent
deliberative assembly, and the direct and acknowledged election of the
nation's Chief Magistrate by the nation itself. In the constitution of
the Democratic Party, as it grouped itself round him, we get the first
beginnings of the "primary," that essential organ of direct democracy of
which English Parliamentarism has no hint, but which is the most vital
feature of American public life. But, most of all, from his triumph and
the abasement of his enemies dates t