148 State Papers and Addresses

osophy of government is the soundest and surest charter of individual liberties
and human rights.

Doubtless, we are better situated to evaluate the worth of various leaders
in this Nation's history than those who lived even during the stirring and event-
ful periods through which our country has passed. As we gaze back over the rise
and fall of men and issues, it is possible to agree on what really counted. To
the glory and pride of our race, men have risen who by nature and intellect
sincerely believed in, and took a whole-hearted stand for, the broad application
of the meaning of democracy to men and women. Unfortunately, that character
of leader does not appear often. We have had probably not more than ten or
a dozen in our history. Jefferson, of course, comes to mind; Lincoln made a
distinct contribution; Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson were bright lights
in the firmament of the Country; our present period is not without illustration
—all humanitarians in the broad sense of the word. But no matter what names
may be mentioned, the name of Andrew Jackson must be included in the list.

It is because his name and memory constitute a symbol of democracy, that
hundreds of similar celebrations are being held tonight throughout the nation.
Historians have said it was only with the advent of Jackson that political
democracy was begun to be realized in the United States. Prior to his selec-
tion as Chief Executive our presidents had been chosen by a relatively small
number of the dominant leaders of our social and economic life. The selection
of "Old Hickory" was the result of a virtual revolution in our political system
and was brought about by the upsurgence of the great mass of the people of
that day.

One foundation stone underlying the very existence of our Party has re-
mained steadfast since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The
guiding star and great light of our Party has been Humanitarianism. Its su-
preme objective has been the comfort, the happiness, the living of people—-not
the people as an organized entity, but as individuals—the men, women and
children who make up the community or the State. With this broad, practical
and applied humanitarianism as their vital principle, the policies of the Demo-
cratic Party have, from period to period, taken form and substance as the con-
temporary requirements of the people have demanded for their protection,
relief and welfare.

The demands of true democratic humanitarianism in its application to the
aid and benefit of the people in large masses are necessarily as varied and
multiform as the different needs of the people from time to time. True de-
mocracy, therefore, is and must be progressive and flexible. It must be made
to fit the conditions and demands of the people as those conditions and demands
change and develop from age to age or from emergency to emergency. Plainly,
the bedrock principle of Thomas Jefferson's political creed was a broad, benign
humanitarianism. True, the condition of the American people in the limited
territory of his day, along the Atlantic seaboard, did not call for the extreme
applications of government aid for the relief and succor of the people. But
the principle was there in its full potentiality.

And when the next great democratic leader, Andrew Jackson, was swept
into power, it was as a champion of the rights and needs of the rank and file
of the people in their humbler existence in the newly-acquired wildernesses of
the Louisiana territory, together with the less settled portions of the old North-
west. To bring relief, support and assistance to the great majority of the