The other of the two great classes to which I have referred held a very opposite opinion of General Jackson. To them he was a military hero and a popular idol. They liked him better for taking Pensacola in defiance of international law. They liked him for bearding the judge who wanted to enforce the habeas corpus. They thought it spirited in him to hang two Englishmen to solve a doubt. I do not mean that they reasoned much about it, for they did not; at bottom they were actuated by an instinct of fellowship. They recognized a man with the same range of ideas and feelings, the same contempt for history, law, Old-World forms, and traditions by which they themselves were actuated. His bluntness, his rollicking, untamed manner, his hit-or-miss arguments, his respect for the popular whim or emotion as the only control he would admit, his plump ignorance which exceeded omniscience in its boldness, all flattered the populace and won its favor. Here was a hero from amongst themselves, using their methods, despising the restrictions of the cultivated and the learned, a virtuoso in negligence and carelessness of manner, aiming at rudeness and bluntness as things worth cultivating, and elevating want of culture into a qualification for greatness and a title to honor. In order to understand the full importance of this you must look at some facts in social and political development which had immediately preceded. At the adoption of the Constitution property qualifications limiting the suffrage were general, but they had been removed steadily and gradually until by 1820 the suffrage was universal throughout almost all the states. The Jeffersonian ideas of government and policy had also spread steadily and rapidly and had received more and more extended interpretation. They were fallacious and only half true at best, that is to say, they were of the most mischievous order of propositions possible in politics; but in popular use and interpretation they had become worn into a kind of political cant, in which the moiety of truth had disappeared and the residuum of falsehood had become the highest political truth and the badge of political orthodoxy. To use the ballot was held synonymous with freedom; the rule of the numerical majority was made equivalent to the republic; the “will of the people” was held paramount to the Constitution--which is nothing more than saying that to do as you choose is superior to doing as you have agreed. And it had become a political dogma that, if there are only enough of you together, when you do as you have a mind to, you are sure to do right. I use the past sense here, but you will at once perceive that I am describing what is still strong amongst us.