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suffrage, and the prominence of domestic questions,--of questions
concerning the business and the daily life of the Republic,--and with
the disappearance of the profound questions concerning the organization
of the government and the nature of government in general, the people
began to assert themselves. Under Jackson and his successors, they made
themselves felt more and more at Washington; their opinions and
sentiments, their likes and dislikes, their whims and prejudices, were
projected into their government. Henceforth, public men were to be
powerful not so much in proportion to their knowledge of statecraft as
in proportion to their popularity. They must represent the popular will,
or commend themselves and their policies to popular favor. The public
men of the old order, like Adams, might be wise and faithful, but they
lacked Clay's and Jackson's sympathetic understanding of the common
people. And of the two new leaders Jackson had by far the stronger hold
on the popular mind and heart. The people had sent him to Washington
because he was of them and like them, and because they liked him. Both
he and they felt that he was their President, and he held himself
responsible to them only.

It seemed, too, that with the new questions and the new men there was
coming a new sort of politics. Jackson meant to serve the people
faithfully, but he entered upon the duties of his great office in the
spirit of a victorious general. The sort of politics most in accord with
his feeling was the sort of politics which prevailed in New York and
Pennsylvania. Jackson once declared, "I am not a politician, but if I
were, I should be a New York politician." Before long, a leading New
York politician, Senator Marcy, expressed the sentiment of his fellows
when he said, "To the victors belong the spoils." That was a sentiment
which a soldier President could understand. In that letter to Monroe
which Major Lewis wrote for him twelve years before, and which won him
votes, he had urged that partisan considerations should not control
appointments; but before he had been President a year he removed more
men from office than all his predecessors had removed since the
beginning of the government. When he left Washington, the practice of
removing and appointing men for political reasons was so firmly
established that the patient work of reform has not to this day
destroyed it. That, to many historians, was the gravest fault of
Jackson's adminis