274 ANDREW JACKSON 



began to look upon our federal Constitution as if it 

 had been suddenly created by an act of miraculous 

 wisdom, and had no roots in European soil. It was 

 telt that our institutions were hedged about by a kind 

 of divinity, and that by means of them we had become 

 better than other nations; and, in our implicit reliance 

 upon the infallible wisdom of the people, we went to 

 work at legislation and at constitution-making in a 

 much less sober spirit than to-day. As for Europe, 

 we exaggerated its political shortcomings most egre- 

 giously, and failed to see that it could have any political 

 lessons for us. The expressions most commonly heard 

 about Europe were " pauper labor " and " effete dy- 

 nasties." People seldom crossed the ocean to look at 

 things over there with their own eyes. The feeling 

 with which children then grew up found expression 

 a little later in such questions as, " What do we care 

 for abroad ? " A gentleman who has been speaker of 

 the House of Representatives and major-general in 

 the army once said in a public speech that too much 

 time was spent in studying the history of England , 

 we had much better study that of the North American 

 Indians ; it was quite enough to know something about 

 the continent we live on, the rest of the world was 

 hardly worth knowing. At one time even the pronun- 

 ciation of the word European seemed in danger of 

 being forgotten ; it was quite commonly pronounced 

 Europian. 



Those were the days of spread-eagle oratory on the 

 Fourth of July, and whenever people were assembled 

 in public, the days when ministers in the pulpit used 

 to thank Heaven that "in spite of all temptations to 

 belong to other nations " we had been born Americans. 



