That Jackson knew little of banking and advanced some strange theories in the course of the fight; that he resorted to methods of violence in some instances; and that he fought to kill, rather than to reform, may be admitted. But the very nature of the fight he waged compelled the Bank to disclose its tremendous power over the prosperity of the people. No matter what they may have thought in the beginning, no one could have doubted toward the end that the Bank did have the power to precipitate panics, to punish the people for legislation it resented, to dominate, in the end, the legislation of the future by the threat of reprisal upon the business of the Nation. No one, in 1834, doubted that the National Bank, in the hands of a man like Biddle domineering over pliant directors, and assuming dictatorial authority over the members of Congress, possessed powers incompatible with the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people. From that day on, the Bank has had its apologists among historians, and Jackson has been excoriated as an ignorant usurper, but there has never been a time since when the American people would have tolerated a return to the system that was destroyed. Through several years the country was to be disturbed by the sometimes stumbling processes of transition from the old to the new system, but the Bank fight ended with the verdict of the polls in 1834. Only the censure of the Senate remained to poison the mind of the iron man in the White House. The Bank lingered on, a little while, under the laws of Pennsylvania, and then crashed to the earth, ruining many of its supporters.[775] And on the banker’s death, Hone copied into his diary the comment of William Cullen Bryant in the “New York Evening Post,” that Biddle “died at his country seat where he passed the last of his days in elegant retirement, which, if justice had taken place, would have been spent in the penitentiary.”[776] The prolonged battle has left a lasting impression upon the political life and methods of the Republic. It aroused, as never before, that class consciousness, to which politicians have ever since appealed; it gave dignity to demagogy, and made it pay. It marked the beginning of the active participation of powerful corporations, as such, in the politics of the country, witnessed the adoption of the methods of intimidation and coercion, of systematic propaganda, of the subsidization of disreputable newspapers. From that day on, the powerful corporation has been anathema to the masses, monopoly has been a red rag, and the contest between capital and labor has been a reality. If this has been unfortunate, the fault has been no less with Clay, who sought and made the issue, and with Biddle and his arrogant reliance on the power of money, than with Jackson and the Kitchen Cabinet who challenged the political pretensions of the Bank. IV