In the long run the effect of the spoils system was, of course, just the opposite of that anticipated by the early Jacksonian Democrats.  It merely substituted one kind of office-holding privilege for another.  It helped to build up a group of professional politicians who became in their turn an office-holding clique—­the only difference being that one man in his political life held, not one, but many offices.  Yet the Jacksonian Democrat undoubtedly believed, when he introduced the system into the Federal civil service, that he was carrying out a desirable reform along strictly democratic lines.  He was betrayed into such an error by the narrowness of his own experience and of his intellectual outlook.  His experience had been chiefly that of frontier life, in which the utmost freedom of economic and social movement was necessary; and he attempted to apply the results of this limited experience to the government of a complicated social organism whose different parts had very different needs.  The direct results of the attempt were very mischievous.  He fastened upon the American public service a system of appointment which turned political office into the reward of partisan service, which made it unnecessary for the public officials to be competent and impossible for them to be properly experienced, and which contributed finally to the creation of a class of office-holding politicians.  But the introduction of the spoils system had a meaning superior to its results.  It was, after all, an attempt to realize an ideal, and the ideal was based on a genuine experience.  The “Virginian Oligarchy,” although it was the work of Jefferson and his followers, was an anachronism in a state governed in the spirit of Jeffersonian Democratic principles.  It was better for the Jacksonian Democrats to sacrifice what they believed to be an obnoxious precedent to their principles than to sacrifice their principles to mere precedent.  If in so doing they were making a mistake, that was because their principles were wrong.  The benefit which they were temporarily conferring on themselves, as a class in the community, was sanctioned by the letter and the spirit of their creed.

Closely connected with their perverted ideas and their narrow view of life, we may discern a leaven of new and useful democratic experience.  The new and useful experience which they contributed to our national stock was that of homogeneous social intercourse.  I have already remarked that the Western pioneers were the first large body of Americans who were genuinely national in feeling.  They were also the first large body of Americans who were genuinely democratic in feeling.  Consequently they imparted a certain emotional consistency to the American democracy, and they thereby performed a social service which was in its way quite as valuable as their political service.  Democracy has always been stronger as a political than it has as a social force.  When adopted as a political ideal of the American people, it was very