This may pass for American history, in Europe and in a foreign language, and even finds abettors here to make it American history in the United States, with a preface and notes to enforce and commend it: but America will find historians of her own to do justice to the national, and to individual character. In the mean time I have some knowledge of General Jackson, and the American people, and the two presidential elections with which they honored the General; and will oppose it, that is, my knowledge, to the flippant and shallow statements of Mons. de Tocqueville. "_A man of violent temper._" I ought to know something about that--contemporaries will understand the allusion--and I can say that General Jackson had a good temper, kind and hospitable to every body, and a feeling of protection in it for the whole human race, and especially the weaker and humbler part of it. He had few quarrels on his own account; and probably the very ones of which Mons. de Tocqueville had heard were accidental, against his will, and for the succor of friends. "_Mediocre talent, and no capacity to govern a free people._" In the first place, free people are not governed by any man, but by laws. But to understand the phrase as perhaps intended, that he had no capacity for civil administration, let the condition of the country at the respective periods when he took up, and when he laid down the administration, answer. He found the country in domestic distress--pecuniary distress--and the national and state legislation invoked by leading politicians to relieve it by empirical remedies;--tariffs, to relieve one part of the community by taxing the other;--internal improvement, to distribute pubic money;--a national bank, to cure the paper money evils of which it was the author;--the public lands the pillage of broken bank paper;--depreciated currency and ruined exchanges;--a million and a half of "unavailable funds" in the treasury;--a large public debt;--the public money the prey of banks;--no gold in the country--only twenty millions of dollars in silver, and that in banks which refused, when they pleased, to pay it down in redemption of their own notes, or even to render back to depositors. Stay laws, stop laws, replevin laws, baseless paper, the resource in half the States to save the debtor from his creditor; and national bankrupt laws from Congress, and local insolvent laws, in the States, the demand of every session. Indian tribes occupying a half, or a quarter of the area of southern States, and unsettled questions of wrong and insult, with half the powers of Europe. Such was the state of the country when General Jackson became President: what was it when he left the Presidency? Protective tariffs, and federal internal improvement discarded; the national bank left to expire upon its own limitation; the public lands redeemed from the pillage of broken bank paper; no more "unavailable funds;" an abundant gold and silver currency; the public debt paid off; the treasury made independent of banks; the Indian tribes removed from the States; indemnities obtained from all foreign powers for all past aggressions, and to new ones committed; several treaties obtained from great powers that never would treat with us before; peace, friendship, and commerce with all the world; and the measures established which, after one great conflict with the expiring Bank of the United States, and all her affiliated banks in 1837, put an end to bank dominion in the United States, and all its train of contractions and expansions, panic and suspension, distress and empirical relief. This is the answer which the respective periods of the beginning and the ending of General Jackson's administration gives to the flippant imputation of no capacity for civil government. I pass on to the next. "_The majority of the enlightened classes always opposed to him._" A majority of those classes which Mons. de Tocqueville would chiefly see in the cities, and along the highways--bankers, brokers, jobbers, contractors, politicians, and speculators--were certainly against him, and he as certainly against them: but the mass of the intelligence of the country was with him! and sustained him in retrieving the country from the deplorable condition in which the "enlightened classes" had sunk it! and in advancing it to that state of felicity at home, and respect abroad, which has made it the envy and admiration of the civilized world, and the absorbent of populations of Europe. I pass on. "_Raised to the Presidency and maintained there solely by the recollection of the victory at New Orleans._" Here recollection, and military glare, reverse the action of their ever previous attributes, and become stronger, instead of weaker, upon the lapse of time.