REFORM AND DEMOCRACY 81 



daunted before this argument, and sustained 

 the spoils system without flinching in the face 

 of the evils that it increasingly involved. 



The era of Jacksonism in America and Whig 

 reform in Great Britain was marked by a sig 

 nificant change in the character and extent of 

 the information about the republic that was 

 embodied in the British literature of the day. 

 For a decade and more after the Treaty of Ghent 

 Tory sentiment had predominated in both trav 

 ellers books 1 and the periodical press whenever 

 the United States was the subject of discus 

 sion. Radicals, humanitarians, agriculturists, 

 interested in the conditions among the com 

 mon people, found somewhat to commend in 

 the bounty of nature and the material comfort 

 and prosperity of man. Social, intellectual, and 

 spiritual conditions generally impressed the 

 Briton as repulsive and intolerable. Politics 

 and government, so far as they were at all in 

 telligible, seemed unbalanced, incoherent, and 

 corrupt. These views of the United States 

 were systematically and repeatedly set forth, 

 with all the effect of skilled literary massing and 

 polish, in the great Tory organ of the day, the 

 Quarterly Review. Its distinguished Whig rival, 



the valuable article by E. D. Adams, &quot;The British Traveler in 

 America,&quot; in Political Science Quarterly, June, 1914. 



