withdraw from the Cabinet, and thus escape the operation of the rule, which excluded Cabinet ministers from the succession. His resignation was accepted, and, to remove him for a time from the scene of political strife, he was sent as Minister to England.

Then the Vice-President blundered again. Allying himself for the moment with Whig Senators, he formed a combination powerful enough to reject the nomination of Mr. Van Buren, who was thus compelled to return from England after holding the post of Minister for a few months. Mr. Calhoun was convinced that such an emphatic censure, by the Senate of the United States, would lay his rival prostrate forever. He was overheard to say to one of his friends: "It will kill him, sir, kill him dead. He will never kick, sir, never kick." Seldom has a man been more mistaken. The Democratic party welcomed Van Buren's return as they would have welcomed a conqueror, and General Jackson instantly set on foot measures to make the rejected minister Vice-President of the United States.

There was a difficulty in the way which much perplexed the White House managers, and the solution of which has had important and lasting consequences. How should Mr. Van Buren be nominated for the Vice-Presidency? Other gentlemen had their eyes upon the post, and Martin Van Buren had not the national reputation which could call forth a spontaneous and universal nomination. It was, also, highly important that this nomination should appear spontaneous, and, especially, that the President's hand should not be seen in it. It was Major William B. Lewis, the President's most confidential friend, and an inmate of the White House, who suggested the solution of the problem. In a letter to Amos Kendal, of May, 1831, he reviewed the situation, and the claims of the several candidates, and added the following words:

"Surrounded by so many difficulties as the case is, and taking every thing into consideration, many of our friends (and the most judicious of them) think it would be best for the Republican members of the respective Legislatures to propose to the people to elect delegates to a NATIONAL CONVENTION, to be holden for that purpose at Harrisburg, or some other place, about the middle of next May. That point is preferred, to prevent an improper interference by members of Congress, who about that time will leave this city for their respective homes. If the Legislature of New Hampshire will propose this, I think it will be followed up by others, and have the effect, no doubt, of putting a stop to partial nominations. You had better reflect upon this proposition, and, if you think with me, make the

suggestion to our friend Hill (one of the Senators from New Hampshire)."

This ingenious proposition was approved by Mr. Kendal and Mr. Hill. The docile legislators of the Granite State, to the number of one hundred and sixty-nine, immediately met in caucus, and adopted the plan which Major Lewis had suggested. The Globe seconded the proposal for a National Convention; other Legislatures sanctioned it; and due care was taken, by the friends of the Administration, that the right delegates should attend it. The Convention met at Baltimore, in May, 1832, and it consisted of three hundred and twenty-six dele gates. Leading members, who were disinclined to vote for Mr. Van Buren, were given distinctly to understand, that they must vote for the President's candidate, or be prepared to quarrel with the Presi dent. Such was the power of the Administration, and such the discipline of the party, that, out of the three hundred and twenty-six delegates, only sixty-six presumed to give a vote against Martin Van Buren-just enough to impart to the deliberations of the Convention a slight show of independence. The people, however, were not quite so obedient to the mandates of a party chief. General Jackson received two hundred and nineteen electoral votes in 1832, while Mr. Van Buren received but one hundred and eighty-nine; which, however, was forty-four more than he needed.

Thus was inaugurated the system of nominating candidates by National Convention; which has continued to the present time. State nominating Conventions had been frequently held; and, when railroads were about to make all parts of the country easily accessible, the system properly and naturally became National.

The plan is open to objections, as every plan would be; but it is probably the fairest and best which the case admits. The great objection to the system does not exist in the system itself, but in the overshadowing influence of an administration through its control of the office-holders. So long as the President possessed an unlimited power of removal, a nominating Convention consisted, necessarily, either of men in office who desired to keep their offices, or of men out of office who desired to have office. No Convention for the nomination of Presidential candidates has ever yet been held, which did not chiefly consist, either of office-holders or office-seekers. The Convention, for example, which nominated Mr. Van Buren for the Presidency in 1836, was almost entirely composed of men pledged to his support, and whose defection would have been instantly visited by their dismissal from valuable posts, or the dismissal of their friends.

It was in no sense a deliberative body. No choice was given it. No regiment of the army could feel itself more bound to obey the orders of its colonel, than this Convention felt itself bound to comply with the known desires of the President. It is well for the people to understand this. A President who remains united with the party that elected him, and who has an unlimited power of removal from office, is in a position to dictate to the Convention of his party the man it shall nominate.

Andrew Jackson was gone from the scene. Men whose will is stronger than their intelligence are disturbing influences in public affairs, like hurricanes and earthquakes in the natural world; and it is surprising to notice how speedily the ordinary tendencies resume their sway when the disturbing influence is withdrawn. The nations of Europe, for example, took their ancient boundaries and institutions the moment Napoleon was suppressed, and things went their usual course almost as though that conqueror had never existed. Andrew Jackson, by the force of his tyrannical will, had put Van Buren up, but he could not keep him up; and he had put the nullifiers down, but he could not keep them down. The old feuds remained, and the natural antagonisms revived. Mr. Van Buren, however, besides being an excellent political manager, was naturally inclined to conciliation, and the personal ambition of Mr. Calhoun was at that time more powerful than his attachment to the compact band of Southern men of whom he was the chief. Mr. Van Buren opened the door of reconciliation very wide, and the country was soon surprised to see the South Carolinian a favored guest of the White House, and a defender of Mr. Van Buren's Administration. The Democratic party, therefore, was still united, and Mr. Van Buren experienced not the slightest difficulty in securing a party nomination for a second term.

It was formerly part of the unwritten law of politics, that a President, in full communion with his party, was entitled to a nomination for a second term. The example of General Washington, in declining to serve a third term, no President has been willing to disregard, and it appears to be as binding as though it were a part of the Constitution. But a failure to be once re-elected used to be considered in the light of a stigma. So the first Adams regarded it, and so the second Adams. It was as though they had been tried in the administration of the Government and had been found wanting; and it was therefore regarded, not as a dignified retirement from an exalted station, but as an ignominious dismissal from it. John Adams, indeed, was so indignant at his rejection by the people in 1800, that he could not bring

himself to remain in Washington to witness the inauguration of his rival, but hurried away at daybreak on the last morning of his term. And it was many years before the people generally regarded him in any other light than that of a man rejected and disgraced. His wiser but less gifted son submitted with a better grace. Not the less, however, was his defeat in 1828 considered ignominious by the party which had elected him.

Mr. Van Buren, faithful to the principles of his illustrious predecessor, and having at his absolute command the whole army of officeholders, was renominated in 1840 without the slightest formidable opposition. He fully expected to be re-elected. From his remarks upon the campaign of 1840, in his work recently published, we may conclude that he died without understanding the causes of his defeat, which he attributed to a momentary popular delirium, excited, he says, "by a ruthless war of eight years," waged against him by the friends of Henry Clay. He even expected, like General Jackson, to name his successor, and that successor was to have been Thomas H. Benton, of Missouri.

But in the United States there is always a power behind the throne greater than the throne itself. In spite of appearances to the contrary, the people do rule. Party managers frequently appear to control the course of events; but, upon the whole, and in the long run, they do so only so far as they execute the real wish and intention of the people. Every thing which they do, every part of their mysterious and extensive plans, is executed with a distinct, a conscious, reference to its influence upon elections, which is only another way of saying, that their aim is to anticipate and execute the public will. Skill in party management chiefly consists in leading the people in the way in which they desire to go.

Mr. Van Buren's failure in 1840 was owing to a single error committed by General Jackson, and sustained by himself. The great event of General Jackson's Administration was the destruction of the United States Bank, a measure popular at the time, and ever since sustained by the people. The error to which we refer, the consequences of which were inherited by Mr. Van Buren, was not the destruction of the bank, but the destruction of it without providing a suitable depository of the public money to take its place. The subtreasury had not yet been thought of. The money of the Government was scattered about among twenty-five State banks, and the possession of these funds gave to the banks an unnatural and pernicious expansion of their capital, and tempted other banks to increase the volume

of their currency. Thus the country was flooded with paper money, which stimulated the wildest speculation in land, and brought about a state of things similar to that which prevailed during the third and fourth years of the late war. Three months after Mr. Van Buren's inauguration, the reaction reached a crisis, the bubble burst, the banks suspended, merchants failed, credit ceased to be, and ruin filled the land. General Jackson had sown the wind, and his successor reaped the whirlwind. The retribution was just, for nearly every important financial measure of General Jackson had received Mr. Van Buren's support.

"I arrived," he tells us, in his posthumous work, "at New York, from my brief mission to England, after the 'Bank Bill' had passed both houses, and on the day it was sent to President Jackson for his approval, and left the next morning for Washington. Arriving there at midnight, I proceeded at once to the White House, in pursuance of an invitation he had sent to New York in anticipation of my coming. I found the General in bed, supported by pillows, in miserable health, but awake, and awaiting and expecting me. Before suffering me to take a seat, and whilst still holding my hand, he, with characteristic eagerness when in the execution of weighty concerns, spoke to me of the bank, of the bill that had been sent for his approval, and of the satisfaction he derived from my arrival at so critical a moment; and I have not forgotten the satisfaction which beamed from his countenance when I expressed a hope that he would veto it, and when I declared my opinion that it was in that way only he could discharge the great duty he owed to the country and to himself. Not that he was ignorant of my views upon the subject, for in all our conversations in respect to it before I left the country-and they had been frequent and anxious-my voice had been decided as well against the then existing, as against any other National Bank. Neither that he was himself in doubt as to the course that he ought to pursue, for he entertained none. But the satisfaction he evinced, and which he expressed in the most gratifying terms, arose solely from the relief he derived from finding himself so cordially sustained in a step he had determined to take, but in respect to which he had been severely harassed by the stand taken by the leading members of his Cabinet, and by the remonstrances of many timid and not a few false friends, and as yet been encouraged only by the few about him in comparatively subordinate positions who were alike faithful to principle and to himself."

So the great bank, which had for twenty years received and dis