The Jacksonians

by Leonard D. White. The Macmillan Company. 593 pp. $3.

The purely administrative system of the Federal government has an importance often overlooked by historians, and in this book Dr. White goes far to remedy this oversight. He examines the results of the advent of Jacksonian democracy, when the people laid their own hands on large parts of the administrative mechanism, and concludes that the democratic character of governmental administration which resulted was in reality the great contribution of the Jacksonians. This, he says, “brought endless sources of vitality into the body administrative from the body politic,” and made it certain that “the relationship between the people and their administrative system was not again to suggest preference to the well-born and the well-to-do.”