Then it took to business colleges and technical schools for the dissemination of the same. Especially did this class despise any historical or scientific doctrines which came from the other side of the water. It was a general premise that the new country needed new systems throughout the whole social and political fabric, and that what was enforced by European experience was surely inapplicable here. As against England this assumption was considered especially strong. In the writings of some of the men who greatly influenced public opinion from 1820 to 1830 this amounted almost to fanaticism. “Home industry,” and “Internal Improvements,” owed much of their success over the mind of the nation to the industrious use of this prejudice. These subjects were not political issues until 1830. Of course I have nothing to do with the question which to many would seem to be here the only important one, _viz._, whether these traits are not noble and praiseworthy and do not constitute the Americans the first nation in the world. Those are idle questions. Political institutions are not framed to produce noble and praiseworthy men. If any are planned to that end they always fail. But political institutions follow the social and industrial conditions, if the people adapt themselves to the facts of the case. So it has been here; and, although I have used the past tense in this description of the effects of rapid prosperity, you observe that the features are those which still mark our American society as a whole. I have simply to take cognizance of these effects as facts inseparable from the conditions of that society. Here, then, I come to the assertion to which I desire especially to call your attention under my present subject: that is, that General Jackson’s personal popularity and his political influence were not created by him at all, but were simply the results of the fact that he exactly fitted in as a leader into the rising class of persons of small property, low education, and crude notions of politics and finance. Of this class he was the leader as long as he lived. You will recognize here an illustration of the wider historical generalization, that the prominent man and his surroundings always act and react on one another and the old question as to which “causes” the other is idle.