Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/366

 The National Bank being doomed if Jackson should be reëlected, a large moneyed class had been drawn into the administration party, viz., those who wanted to found local banks. The administration party, therefore, included these two branches, to the former or lower of which the nickname Locofoco was given.

General Jackson regarded his reëlection as a sanction of all that he had done or proposed. According to his principles the question of wisdom in banking and currency did not come from history or science, but from a majority vote of the people. What is to be noticed, however, is that the people simply assented to whatever he proposed and ratified whatever he did, because it was he that did it. There resulted a state of things paralleled in our history only in the case of Mr. Jefferson, that is, an action and reaction between the executive and a popular majority in which each stimulated the other by ready sympathy and mutual support. The President pursued his way without a misgiving, and the opposition in Congress while they saw their members dwindling and the majority becoming more and more overwhelming, could only express their astonishment at the sudden acts and irregular methods of procedure of the executive. The subservient majority, consisting largely of professional politicians of the new type, recognized that for the time being their occupation of plotting and controling was gone. Their hopes lay in no independent action, but in loyalty to the chief.

I feel here how much I am saying which under other circumstances would require proof, but the proof lies before any one who will throw aside Benton and Parton and look into the Congressional debates and the newspapers of the time.

The President now pushed on his hostility to the Bank, being doubly enraged by the efforts it had made to fight its own battle in contending against him during the campaign.