Mr. Adams’s plan did, indeed, seem excellent.  It commanded the respect of honest but busy citizens absorbed in their private affairs and desirous that the government might be fixed, once for all, in settled grooves, so that its functions would proceed like the steady progress of the seasons.  It was an attempt to run the government, as has been sometimes said, “on business principles.”  The President was to proceed, and did proceed, as if he had in charge some great estate which he was to manage and direct as a faithful and exact trustee.  This, no one can deny, had the superficial look of most admirable administration.

But President Adams had left out of account largely what we are compelled to sedulously consider—­public opinion.  He had acquired most of his experience abroad, and his principal service at home, as Secretary of State, had been in a remarkably quiet time, when party movements were neither ebbing nor flowing, so that he had forgotten how strong and vigorous the democratic feeling was amongst the population of these States.  This is a forgetfulness to which all men are liable who long occupy official position, and who seldom have to submit themselves to that severe and rude competitive examination which the plan of popular elections establishes.  Unfortunately for him, he was not responsible to a court of chancery for the management of his trust, but to a tribunal composed of a multitude of judges.  His accounts were to be passed upon not by one learned and conservative auditor guided by familiar precedents and rules of law, but a great, tumultuous popular assembly, which would approve or disapprove by a majority vote.  When, therefore, it appeared to the people that he was forming a body of permanent office-holders—­was recruiting a civil army to occupy in perpetuity the offices which they, the mass, had created and were taxed to pay for—­the fierce, and in many respects scandalous, partisan assault which Jackson represented, if he did not direct, gathered overwhelming force.  It seemed to the popular view that a narrow, an exclusive, an aristocratic system was being formed.  The President appeared to be, while honestly and carefully preserving their trust from waste or loss, committing it to a control independent of them—­an official body which, having a permanent tenure, would be altogether indifferent to their varying desires.  Such a scheme of government was therefore no more than an attempt to stand the pyramid on its apex:  Mr. Adams’s administration, supported chiefly by those whose aspirations were for an honest and capable bureaucracy, and who could not or would not face the rude questionings of democracy, ended with his first four years, and went out in such a whirlwind of partisan opposition as brought in, by reaction, the infamous “spoils system” that at the end of half a century we are but partially recovered from.