capital to
favor capital," he appealed to the fact of the country's extent and its
sectional divergences against the nationalizing of capital.

What a condition for a confederacy of states! What grounds for
alarm and terrible apprehension when in a confederacy of such
vast extent, so many rival commercial cities, so much
sectional jealousy, such violent political parties, such
fierce contests for power, there should be but one moneyed
tribunal before which all the rival and contending elements
must appear.

Even more vehement were the words of Jackson in 1837. "It is now plain,"
he wrote, "that the war is to be carried on by the monied aristocracy of
the few against the democracy of numbers; the [prosperous] to make the
honest laborers hewers of wood and drawers of water through the credit
and paper system."

Van Buren's administration is usually passed hastily over with hardly
more than mention of his Independent Treasury plan, and with particular
consideration of the slavery discussion. But some of the most important
movements in American social and political history began in these years
of Jackson and Van Buren. Read the demands of the obscure labor papers
and the reports of labor's open-air meetings anew, and you will find in
the utterances of so-called labor visionaries and the Locofoco champions
of "equal rights for all and special privileges for none," like Evans
and Jacques, Byrdsall and Leggett, the finger points to the currents
that now make the main channel of our history; you will find in them
some of the important planks of the platforms of the triumphant parties
of our own day. As Professor Commons has shown by his papers and the
documents which he has published on labor history, an idealistic but
widespread and influential humanitarian movement, strikingly similar to
that of the present, arose in the years between 1830 and 1850, dealing
with social forces in American life, animated by a desire to apply the
public lands to social amelioration, eager to find new forms of
democratic development. But the flood of the slavery struggle swept all
of these movements into its mighty inundation for the time. After the
war, other influences delayed the revival of the movement. The railroads
opened the wide prairies after 1850 and made it easy to reach them; and
decade after decade new sections were reduced to the purposes of
civilization and to the advantages of the common man a