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 obliged 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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