Calvinism itself, for all of its insistence upon the value of the individual soul, taught also the principle of the equality of all souls before God. It was thus that the _Institutes_ of Calvin became one of the charters of democracy. The democratic drift in the writings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known to need any further comment. The triumph of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a triumph of democratic principles; and although a Tory reaction came promptly, although Hamiltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check to over-radical, populistic theories, the history of the last century and a quarter has abundantly shown the vitality and the endurance of democratic ideas. One may fairly say that the decade in which American democracy revealed its most ugly and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper came home from long sojourns in Europe. They found themselves confronted at once by sensitive, suspicious neighbors who hated England and Europe and had a lurking or open hostility towards anything that savored of Old World culture. Yet in that very epoch when English visitors were passing their most harsh and censorious verdict upon American culture, Emerson was writing in his _Journal_ (June 18, 1834) a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils of our democracy, so far as literature was concerned, were to be cured by the remedy of more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns away from the universities and the traditional culture of New England and looks towards the Jacksonism of the new West to create a new and native American literature? Here is the passage:-- "We all lean on England; scarce a verse, a page, a newspaper, but is writ in imitation of English forms; our very manners and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the country, heedless of English and of all literature--a stone cut out of the ground without hands;--they may root out the hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way, and the new-born may begin again to frame their own world with greater advantage."