-i860] The old order changing. 421 chief place among those held by the President's advisers, had come to be looked upon as next to the Presidency itself in the line of party prefer- ment, and statesman after statesman had passed through it to the chief national office. It was a sort of parliamentary regime inherited from England, where parties had long officered the government with their real leaders in legislation and policy; and it had been readily maintained because in almost all the older States the franchise had been in some degree restricted, and because there was a virtual social hierarchy in New England no less than in the South, where society was obviously aristo- cratic in its ideals of authority and precedence. The lawyers and the ministers, university men for the most part, and schooled to represent the prestige of training, of established forms, of learning, and of experience, still wielded in New England a power almost as substantial as that which had marked the authority of the governing class in the old colonies during the early eighteenth century; and the lawyers were of course the active politicians, an unquestioned preference being accorded all the while to certain families, as for instance the Adams family an order of affairs which any Englishman of that generation might have recognised as natural and familiar enough. But a day came when the older States and communities of the seaboard no longer held their former undisputed place of governance in the politics of the Union. The great westward movement had set in. By 1850 Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and California had been added to the roster of the States from the western lands, where frontiersmen had founded a new democracy. Limi- tations upon the suffrage began to be discredited and broken down : the new States did not adopt them, and the old States in the face of their example could not keep them. Men without the training or the social standards of the older parts of the country made their way into affairs and grew impatient of the unsympathetic domination of the eastern leaders by prerogative. They pushed their own propositions and candidates, and presently thrust aside Virginians and Massachusetts men to make Andrew Jackson President. The breaking up of the old order was accompanied by many signifi- cant innovations and changes. State legislatures began to nominate candidates for the presidency ; the younger men and the local political managers grew very jealous of the private and exclusive authority of congressional committees and "caucuses"; and by 1832 a new and popular machinery of nomination had been substituted, in which the part of public leadership was minimised and the art of getting votes and organising majorities magnified. This was the nominating convention, which has ever since been one of the chief instruments of party action in the United States, not only naming the candidates for the presidential office, but also giving authoritative formulation to the legislative and administrative programmes of the parties, and so binding CH. XIII.
