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their fellows. It was an unconscious imitation of the
 
English and the French systems of the seventeenth century -
 
the fussy, cantankerous John Randolph was about the only
 
member of Congress who knew enough of history to give
 
Clay's so-called "American system" its proper European
 
name. Clay fought long and hard, always dreaming of the
 
Presidency for himself, Daniel Webster and the unscrupu-
 
lous bank president, Nicholas Biddle, his ablest lieuten-
 
ants. He was defeated by the rising cotton kingdom in the
 
South and it was left to the troubled Abraham Lincoln, in
 
the midst of a great war, 1861-64, to grant industrialists
 
and bankers all that the dead Clay had promised them. The
 
economic nationalism which Benjamin Franklin and George
 
Mason had feared and warned Washington against was now
 
firmly fixed on "free American soil" and its success was
 
far greater than that of Clarendon or Colbert. England,
 
France and Germany had, after long debates, adopted in the
 
main the Adam Smith philosophy on which the Americans had
 
gone to war in 1776. That is, Europe had adopted the ideals
 
of Young America and opened their markets in order to
 
sell their growing industrial output to the far corners
 
of the world. The United States had adopted the attitude
 
of Europe in 1776 and closed their vast domestic market
 
while they sold billions of dollars worth of foodstuffs
 
to England, France and Germany. There had never been any-
 
thing like it in all history. England and Germany developed
 
                                        :~
more in fifty years than either of them had developed in
 
the preceding five hundred years. It was the machine age,
 
and populations increased faster than machines. Cyrus
 
 
 
McCormick