required.  The farmer was obliged to be all kinds of a rough mechanic.  The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper.  Almost everybody was something of a politician.  The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly large.  Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success.  In such a society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient.  His finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of his neighbors.  He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards.

It is no wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement.  Such a man did insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value.  Consequently they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with special vocations.  For the most part this suppression was easily accomplished by the action of ordinary social and economic motives.  All the industrial, political, and social rewards went to the man who pursued his business, professional, or political career along regular lines; and in this way an ordinary task and an interested motive were often imposed on men who were better qualified for special tasks undertaken from disinterested motives.  But it was not enough to suppress the man with a special vocation by depriving him of social and pecuniary rewards.  Public opinion must be taught to approve of the average man as the representative type of the American democracy, so that the man with a special vocation may be deprived of any interest or share in the American democratic tradition; and this attempt to make the average man the representative American democrat has persisted to the present day—­that is, to a time when the average man is no longer, as in 1830, the dominant economic factor.

It is in this way, most unfortunately, that one of the leading articles in the American popular creed has tended to impair American moral and intellectual integrity.  If the man with special standards and a special vocation interfered with democratic consistency of feeling, it was chiefly because this consistency of feeling had been obtained at too great a sacrifice—­at the sacrifice of a higher to a lower type of individuality.  In all civilized communities the great individualizing force is the resolute, efficient, and intense pursuit