Senator Levi Woodbury, of New Hampshire, the leader of the Jackson party in New Hampshire, endeavored, in the summer of 1829, to have Jeremiah Mason, Mr. Webster's great friend, removed from the presidency of the branch of the United States Bank at Portsmouth, N. H., and Isaac Hill, another New Hampshire friend of the President, attempted at the same time to have the United States pension agency, connected with the Portsmouth branch of the United States Bank, removed to Concord, and connected with a little bank there of which Hill had been president, and in which he was still interested. Jackson's Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Ingham, asked Mr. Biddle, the president of the United States Bank, to have Mason removed, and his Secretary of War, Mr. Eaton, ordered Mason to transfer the pension agency to Hill's bank in Concord. Mr. Biddle looked into the matter, and being convinced that the whole thing was a political scheme, refused to have Mason removed from office, and prevented the execution of Eaton's order in regard to the transfer of the pension agency. These are, very briefly stated, the facts upon which some of the American historians found the theory that Jackson, entertaining no opposition in principle to the Bank at the beginning of his Administration, became so enraged at its managers, because of their success in these petty bouts with his Cabinet officers, that he {192} resolved upon its destruction. The treatment which Adams and Clay had received at the hands of Jackson and his friends from 1824 onward had led them to feel that Jackson's whole nature was full of personal rancor, and that he could see nothing except from a personal point of view. There is little doubt that this feeling largely determined Adams' ideas of Jackson's attitude in the Bank question, and that the historians have written the account of the Bank controversy under the influence of Adams' representations. [Sidenote: Jackson's opposition in principle to the Bank.] There is undoubtedly some truth in this view of the matter, but it is far from being the whole truth. It is not even that part of the truth which is most valuable to the student of American history. There was an opposition in principle to the United States Bank, as well as a personal conflict between leaders in regard to it. That opposition in principle was the opposition of "States' rights" democracy to centralized privilege. In all political systems there is a political science as well as a public, or constitutional, law. The political science of a state is based chiefly upon the actual social conditions and relations of its population, and its public or constitutional law ought to be based upon its political science. In fact, however, we seldom see social conditions, political theory, and public law in a state of perfect harmony. It is the prime problem of political and legal progress to work out this great result. [Sidenote: The political science of the Constitution of 1787.]