b. Jackson was the _Stammvater_ of the new statesmen and
philosophers; he carried the mob's distrust of good taste even into the
field of conduct; he was the first to put the rewards of conformity
above the dictates of common decency; he founded a whole hierarchy of
Philistine messiahs, the roaring of which still belabours the ear.

Once established, this culture of the intellectually disinherited tended
to defend and perpetuate itself. On the one hand, there was no
appearance of a challenge from within, for the exigent problems of
existence in a country that was yet but half settled and organized left
its people with no energy for questioning what at least satisfied their
gross needs, and so met the pragmatic test. And on the other hand, there
was no critical pressure from without, for the English culture which
alone reached over the sea was itself entering upon its Victorian
decline, and the influence of the native aristocracy--the degenerating
_Junkers_ of the great estates and the boorish magnates of the city
_bourgeoisie_--was quite without any cultural direction at all. The
chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter
question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political
difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity,
and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work
of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to
absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so
that devotion to a theory or a candidate became translated into devotion
to a revelation, and the game of politics turned itself into a holy war.
The custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietistic
concepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skilful
persuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the United States.
There has not been a presidential contest since Jackson's day without
its Armageddons, its marching of Christian soldiers, its crosses of
gold, its crowns of thorns. The most successful American politicians,
beginning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those most adept at
twisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of Puritanism to partisan
uses. Every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, on
each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snouting
up of immoralities.

But it was during the long contest against slavery, beginning with the
appearance