The cheaply
and easily made instrument was the efficient instrument, because it was
adapted to a year or two of use, and then for supersession by a better
instrument; and for the service of such tools one man was as likely to be
good as another. No special equipment was required. The farmer was
required to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was
merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of
a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time
was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge,
planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most
of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who
persisted in one job and who applied the most rigorous and exacting
standards to his work was out of place and was really inefficient. His
finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than did
the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and
peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of
his neighbors.
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