they preserved its institutions and continued to enjoy its opportunities.  Their failure to grasp the idea that the Federal Union would not take care of itself, prevented them from taking disunionist ideas seriously, and encouraged them to provoke a crisis, which, subsequently, their fundamental loyalty to the Union prevented from becoming disastrous.  They expected their country to drift to a safe harbor in the Promised Land, whereas the inexorable end of a drifting ship is either the rocks or the shoals.

In their opposition to the consolidation of the national organization, the pioneers believed that they were defending the citadel of their democratic creed.  Democracy meant to them, not only equal opportunities secured by law, but an approximately equal standing among individual citizens, and an approximately equal division of the social and economic fruits.  They realized vaguely that national consolidation brought with it organization, and organization depended for its efficiency upon a classification of individual citizens according to ability, knowledge, and competence.  In a nationalized state, it is the man of exceptional position, power, responsibility, and training who is most likely to be representative and efficient, whereas in a thoroughly democratic state, as they conceived it, the average man was the representative citizen and the fruitful type.  Nationalization looked towards the introduction and perpetuation of a political, social, and financial hierarchy.  They opposed it consequently, on behalf of the “plain people”; and they even reached the conclusion that the contemporary political system was to some extent organized for the benefit of special interests.  They discovered in the fiscal and administrative organization the presence of discrimination against the average man.  The National Bank was an example of special economic privileges.  The office-holding clique was an example of special political privileges.  Jackson and his followers declared war on these sacrilegious anomalies in the temple of democracy.  Thus the only innovations which the pioneers sought to impose on our national political system were by way of being destructive.  They uprooted a national institution which had existed, with but one brief interruption, for more than forty years; and they entirely altered the tradition of appointment in the American civil service.  Both of these destructive achievements throw a great deal of light upon their unconscious tendencies and upon their explicit convictions, and will help us to understand the value and the limitation of the positive contribution which the pioneers made to the fullness of the American democratic idea.