Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/42

22 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS elevation of Rufus King in 1820, or when he strove in 1838 to bring Washington Irving into his cabi net with small promise of gain to his doubtful political fortunes by such an "unpractical" appoint ment. As a statesman he had his compact fagot of opinions, to which he adhered in evil or good report. It might seem that the logic of his principles in 1848, combined with the subsequent drift of events, should have landed him in the Free-soil party that Abraham Lincoln led to victory in 1860; but it is to be remembered that, while Van Buren s political opinions were in a fluid state, they had been cast in the doctrinal moulds of Jefferson, and had there taken rigid form and pressure. In the natural history of American party- formations he supposed that an enduring antithesis had always been dis cernible between the "money power" and the "farming interest" of the land. In his annual message of December, 1838, holding language very modern in its emphasis, he counted "the anti-repub lican tendencies of associated wealth" as among the strains that had been put upon our govern ment. This is indeed the main thesis of his "In quiry," a book which is more an apologia than a history. In that chronicle of his life-long antipa thy to a splendid consolidated government, with its imperial judiciary, funding systems, high tariffs, and internal improvements the whole surmounted by a powerful national bank as the "regulator"