itol.

Harrison's successor, John Tyler, the Vice President, whom the Whigs had
nominated to catch votes in Virginia, was more of a Democrat than
anything else, though he was not partisan enough to please anybody. The
Whigs railed at him because he would not approve the founding of another
United States Bank. The Democrats stormed at him for refusing, until
near the end of his term, to sanction the annexation of Texas, which had
declared its independence of Mexico in 1836. His entire administration,
marked by unseemly wrangling, produced only two measures of importance.
The Whigs, flushed by victory, with the aid of a few protectionist
Democrats, enacted, in 1842, a new tariff law destroying the compromise
which had brought about the truce between the North and the South, in
the days of nullification. The distinguished leader of the Whigs, Daniel
Webster, as Secretary of State, in negotiation with Lord Ashburton
representing Great Britain, settled the long-standing dispute between
the two countries over the Maine boundary. A year after closing this
chapter in American diplomacy, Webster withdrew to private life, leaving
the President to endure alone the buffets of political fortune.

To the end, the Whigs regarded Tyler as a traitor to their cause; but
the judgment of history is that it was a case of the biter bitten. They
had nominated him for the vice presidency as a man of views acceptable
to Southern Democrats in order to catch their votes, little reckoning
with the chances of his becoming President. Tyler had not deceived them
and, thoroughly soured, he left the White House in 1845 not to appear in
public life again until the days of secession, when he espoused the
Southern confederacy. Jacksonian Democracy, with new leadership, serving
a new cause--slavery--was returned to power under James K. Polk, a
friend of the General from Tennessee. A few grains of sand were to run
through the hour glass before the Whig party was to be broken and
scattered as the Federalists had been more than a generation before.

THE INTERACTION OF AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN OPINION

=Democracy in England and France.=--During the period of Jacksonian
Democracy, as in all epochs of ferment, there was a close relation
between the thought of the New World and the Old. In England, the
successes of the American experiment were used as arguments in favor of
overthrowing the aristocracy which George III had manipulated with such
effect against Am