Andrew Jackson represented, in his person, the people, the masses. By birth, education, and mode of living, Andrew Jackson was identified with the Common People, and, as we are all common, with all of the people. Like Abraham Lincoln, the masses saw in Andrew Jackson a champion, ready and brave enough to resent the attempted differentiation sought to be foisted upon the people of America by the then Whig aristocracy--the claimed parent of the Republican party. However, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party was not a progeny of the aristocrats of the Whig party. Andrew Jackson, in his person, represented the purest type of the western pioneer, patriot, and soldier, and such men in America will only be found in the ranks of the people. In 1828, John Quincy Adams, and his party of the would-be “Four Hundred,” received at the hands of the people the same punishment and rebuke that was administered to Benjamin Harrison and the Republican party, which, just like the Whig party, had become hidden from the view of the people by the glamour of wealth and would-be aristocracy that was thrown over it. In Andrew Jackson, the people elected as their chief one possessed of great firmness and decision of character, one who was honest and true; not always correct in judgment, but when he erred the people were ready to forgive him, because the error was one of judgment and not of intention. He was of them, and like them, as Abraham Lincoln was in 1860, and the people’s love and trust in him erased from their memory mistakes that in another would have been judged with a critical eye. He was often rash in expression and action, but his very rashness was the rashness of a man untrained in duplicity. He was not a diplomat. The people are not diplomatic, and he, as one of them, could not be expected to possess characteristics other than those of the mass. His actions were as a mirror in which the people saw themselves. How the chord he struck, when he threatened to hang John C. Calhoun and the nullifiers, finds a responsive echo in many of the utterances of Abraham Lincoln! What two men so nearly resemble each other to the people? The mere idle calling one a Democrat and the other a Republican is, as Hamlet says: “Words, words, words.” There is no significance in the mere word Democrat and Republican. Both were men of the people, elected as the choice of the masses, in the constant battle that the masses wage against the crime of “caste.” The similarity in the characters of Lincoln and Jackson is nowhere more forcibly illustrated than in that both were patriots of the purest stamp. Andrew Jackson took up the administration of the government with fearless energy, feeling confident that he had the unalloyed loyalty of the people to support him. Let us hope that Grover Cleveland, with the same fearless courage, will wage war upon those things objectionable to the people who have placed in his hands the weapons with which to do battle.