University of Virginia Library

IX
Contributions Of The West To American Democracy[1]

Political thought in the period of the French Revolution
tended to treat democracy as an absolute system applicable
to all times and to all peoples, a system that was to be created
by the act of the people themselves on philosophical
principles. Ever since that era there has been an inclination
on the part of writers on democracy to emphasize the analytical
and theoretical treatment to the neglect of the underlying
factors of historical development.

If, however, we consider the underlying conditions and
forces that create the democratic type of government, and at
times contradict the external forms to which the name democracy
is applied, we shall find that under this name there have
appeared a multitude of political types radically unlike in
fact.

The careful student of history must, therefore, seek the
explanation of the forms and changes of political institutions
in the social and economic forces that determine them.
To know that at any one time a nation may be called a democracy,
an aristocracy, or a monarchy, is not so important as to
know what are the social and economic tendencies of the state.
These are the vital forces that work beneath the surface and
dominate the external form. It is to changes in the economic
and social life of a people that we must look for the forces
that ultimately create and modify organs of political action.

For the time, adaptation of political structure may be incomplete
or concealed. Old organs will be utilized to express
new forces, and so gradual and subtle will be the change that
it may hardly be recognized. The pseudo-democracies under
the Medici at Florence and under Augustus at Rome are familiar
examples of this type. Or again, if the political structure
be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by
growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation
may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French
Revolution. In all these changes both conscious ideals and
unconscious social reorganization are at work.

These facts are familiar to the student, and yet it is doubtful
if they have been fully considered in connection with
American democracy. For a century at least, in conventional
expression, Americans have referred to a "glorious Constitution"
in explaining the stability and prosperity of their
democracy. We have believed as a nation that other peoples
had only to will our democratic institutions in order to repeat
our own career.

In dealing with Western contributions to democracy, it is
essential that the considerations which have just been mentioned
shall be kept in mind. Whatever these contributions
may have been, we find ourselves at the present time in an
era of such profound economic and social transformation as to
raise the question of the effect of these changes upon the
democratic institutions of the United States. Within a decade
four marked changes have occurred in our national development;
taken together they constitute a revolution.

First, there is the exhaustion of the supply of free land and
the closing of the movement of Western advance as an effective
factor in American development. The first rough conquest
of the wilderness is accomplished, and that great supply
of free lands which year after year has served to reinforce

the democratic influences in the United States is exhausted. It
is true that vast tracts of government land are still untaken,
but they constitute the mountain and arid regions, only a small
fraction of them capable of conquest, and then only by the application
of capital and combined effort. The free lands that
made the American pioneer have gone.

In the second place, contemporaneously with this there
has been such a concentration of capital in the control of
fundamental industries as to make a new epoch in the economic
development of the United States. The iron, the coal,
and the cattle of the country have all fallen under the domination
of a few great corporations with allied interests, and
by the rapid combination of the important railroad systems
and steamship lines, in concert with these same forces, even
the breadstuffs and the manufactures of the nation are to some
degree controlled in a similar way. This is largely the work
of the last decade. The development of the greatest iron
mines of Lake Superior occurred in the early nineties, and
in the same decade came the combination by which the coal
and the coke of the country, and the transportation systems
that connect them with the iron mines, have been brought
under a few concentrated managements. Side by side with
this concentration of capital has gone the combination of
labor in the same vast industries. The one is in a certain
sense the concomitant of the other, but the movement acquires
an additional significance because of the fact that during the
past fifteen years the labor class has been so recruited by a
tide of foreign immigration that this class is now largely made
up of persons of foreign parentage, and the lines of cleavage
which begin to appear in this country between capital and labor
have been accentuated by distinctions of nationality.

A third phenomenon connected with the two just mentioned
is the expansion of the United States politically and commercially

into lands beyond the seas. A cycle of American
development has been completed. Up to the close of the
War of 1812, this country was involved in the fortunes of the
European state system. The first quarter of a century of our
national existence was almost a continual struggle to prevent
ourselves being drawn into the European wars. At the close
of that era of conflict, the United States set its face toward
the West. It began the settlement and improvement of the
vast interior of the country. Here was the field of our colonization,
here the field of our political activity. This process
being completed, it is not strange that we find the United
States again involved in world-politics. The revolution that
occurred four years ago, when the United States struck down
that ancient nation under whose auspices the New World was
discovered, is hardly yet more than dimly understood. The
insular wreckage of the Spanish War, Porto Rico and the
Philippines, with the problems presented by the Hawaiian
Islands, Cuba, the Isthmian Canal, and China, all are indications
of the new direction of the ship of state, and while we
thus turn our attention overseas, our concentrated industrial
strength has given us a striking power against the commerce
of Europe that is already producing consternation in the Old
World. Having completed the conquest of the wilderness,
and having consolidated our interests, we are beginning to
consider the relations of democracy and empire.

And fourth, the political parties of the United States now
tend to divide on issues that involve the question of Socialism.
The rise of the Populist party in the last decade, and
the acceptance of so many of its principles by the Democratic
party under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, show in striking
manner the birth of new political ideas, the reformation of the
lines of political conflict.

It is doubtful if in any ten years of American history more

significant factors in our growth have revealed themselves.
The struggle of the pioneer farmers to subdue the arid lands
of the Great Plains in the eighties was followed by the official
announcement of the extinction of the frontier line in 1890.
The dramatic outcome of the Chicago Convention of 1896
marked the rise into power of the representatives of Populistic
change. Two years later came the battle of Manila, which
broke down the old isolation of the nation, and started it on
a path the goal of which no man can foretell; and finally,
but two years ago came that concentration of which the billion
and a half dollar steel trust and the union of the Northern
continental railways are stupendous examples. Is it not
obvious, then, that the student who seeks for the explanation
of democracy in the social and economic forces that underlie
political forms must make inquiry into the conditions that
have produced our democratic institutions, if he would estimate
the effect of these vast changes? As a contribution to
this inquiry, let us now turn to an examination of the part
that the West has played in shaping our democracy.

From the beginning of the settlement of America, the frontier
regions have exercised a steady influence toward democracy.
In Virginia, to take an example, it can be traced as
early as the period of Bacon's Rebellion, a hundred years
before our Declaration of Independence. The small landholders,
seeing that their powers were steadily passing into
the hands of the wealthy planters who controlled Church and
State and lands, rose in revolt. A generation later, in the
governorship of Alexander Spotswood, we find a contest
between the frontier settlers and the property-holding classes
of the coast. The democracy with which Spotswood had to
struggle, and of which he so bitterly complained, was a democracy
made up of small landholders, of the newer immigrants,
and of indented servants, who at the expiration of their time

of servitude passed into the interior to take up lands and
engage in pioneer farming. The "War of the Regulation,"
just on the eve of the American Revolution, shows the steady
persistence of this struggle between the classes of the interior
and those of the coast. The Declaration of Grievances which
the back counties of the Carolinas then drew up against the
aristocracy that dominated the politics of those colonies
exhibits the contest between the democracy of the frontier and
the established classes who apportioned the legislature in
such fashion as to secure effective control of government.
Indeed, in a period before the outbreak of the American Revolution,
one can trace a distinct belt of democratic territory
extending from the back country of New England down through
western New York, Pennsylvania, and the South.[2]

In each colony this region was in conflict with the dominant
classes of the coast. It constituted a quasi-revolutionary area
before the days of the Revolution, and it formed the basis on
which the Democratic party was afterwards established. It
was, therefore, in the West, as it was in the period before the
Declaration of Independence, that the struggle for democratic
development first revealed itself, and in that area the essential
ideas of American democracy had already appeared. Through
the period of the Revolution and of the Confederation a similar
contest can be noted. On the frontier of New England, along
the western border of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas,
and in the communities beyond the Alleghany Mountains,
there arose a demand of the frontier settlers for independent
statehood based on democratic provisions. There is
a strain of fierceness in their energetic petitions demanding
self-government under the theory that every people have the
right to establish their own political institutions in an area
which they have won from the wilderness. Those revolutionary

principles based on natural rights, for which the seaboard
colonies were contending, were taken up with frontier
energy in an attempt to apply them to the lands of the West.
No one can read their petitions denouncing the control exercised
by the wealthy landholders of the coast, appealing
to the record of their conquest of the wilderness, and demanding
the possession of the lands for which they have fought
the Indians, and which they had reduced by their ax to
civilization, without recognizing in these frontier communities
the cradle of a belligerent Western democracy. "A fool
can sometimes put on his coat better than a wise man can do
it for him,"—such is the philosophy of its petitioners. In
this period also came the contests of the interior agricultural
portion of New England against the coast-wise merchants and
property-holders, of which Shays' Rebellion is the best known,
although by no means an isolated instance.

By the time of the constitutional convention, this struggle for
democracy had affected a fairly well-defined division into parties.
Although these parties did not at first recognize their interstate
connections, there were similar issues on which they
split in almost all the States. The demands for an issue of
paper money, the stay of execution against debtors, and the relief
against excessive taxation were found in every colony in
the interior agricultural regions. The rise of this significant
movement wakened the apprehensions of the men of means, and
in the debates over the basis of suffrage for the House of Representatives
in the constitutional convention of 1787 leaders of
the conservative party did not hesitate to demand that safeguards
to the property should be furnished the coast against the
interior. The outcome of the debate left the question of suffrage
for the House of Representatives dependent upon the policy
of the separate States. This was in effect imposing a property
qualification throughout the nation as a whole, and it

was only as the interior of the country developed that these
restrictions gradually gave way in the direction of manhood
suffrage.

All of these scattered democratic tendencies Jefferson combined,
in the period of Washington's presidency, into the
Democratic-Republican party. Jefferson was the first prophet
of American democracy, and when we analyse the essential
features of his gospel, it is clear that the Western influence
was the dominant element. Jefferson himself was born in the
frontier region of Virginia, on the edge of the Blue Ridge,
in the middle of the eighteenth century. His father was a
pioneer. Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia" reveal clearly his
conception that democracy should have an agricultural basis,
and that manufacturing development and city life were dangerous
to the purity of the body politic. Simplicity and
economy in government, the right of revolution, the freedom
of the individual, the belief that those who win the vacant
lands are entitled to shape their own government in their own
way,—these are all parts of the platform of political principles
to which he gave his adhesion, and they are all elements eminently
characteristic of the Western democracy into which he
was born.

In the period of the Revolution he had brought in a series
of measures which tended to throw the power of Virginia
into the hands of the settlers in the interior rather than of
the coastwise aristocracy. The repeal of the laws of entail
and primogeniture would have destroyed the great estates on
which the planting aristocracy based its power. The abolition
of the Established Church would still further have diminished
the influence of the coastwise party in favor of the dissenting
sects of the interior. His scheme of general public
education reflected the same tendency, and his demand for
the abolition of slavery was characteristic of a representative

of the West rather than of the old-time aristocracy of the
coast. His sympathy with the Western expansion Culminated
in the Louisiana Purchase. In short, the tendencies of Jefferson's
legislation were to replace the dominance of the
planting aristocracy by the dominance of the interior class,
which had sought in vain to achieve its liberties in the period
of Bacon's Rebellion.

Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson was the John the Baptist
of democracy, not its Moses. Only with the slow setting of
the tide of settlement farther and farther toward the interior
did the democratic influence grow strong enough to take actual
possession of the government. The period from 1800 to 1820
saw a steady increase in these tendencies. The established
classes in New England and the South began to take alarm.
Perhaps no better illustration of the apprehensions of the
old-time Federal conservative can be given than these utterances
of President Dwight, of Yale College, in the book of
travels which he published in that period:—

Such was a conservative's impression of that pioneer movement
of New England colonists who had spread up the valley
of the Connecticut into New Hampshire, Vermont, and western
New York in the period of which he wrote, and who
afterwards went on to possess the Northwest. New England
Federalism looked with a shudder at the democratic ideas
of those who refused to recognize the established order. But
in that period there came into the Union a sisterhood of frontier
States—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri—with provisions
for the franchise that brought in complete democracy.

Even the newly created States of the Southwest showed
the tendency. The wind of democracy blew so strongly
from the West, that even in the older States of New York,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia, conventions were
called, which liberalized their constitutions by strengthening
the democratic basis of the State. In the same time the labor
population of the cities began to assert its power and its
determination to share in government. Of this frontier democracy
which now took possession of the nation, Andrew Jackson
was the very personification. He was born in the backwoods
of the Carolinas in the midst of the turbulent democracy
that preceded the Revolution, and he grew up in the
frontier State of Tennessee. In the midst of this region of
personal feuds and frontier ideals of law, he quickly rose to
leadership. The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor
of Congress was an omen full of significance. He reached
Philadelphia at the close of Washington's administration,
having ridden on horseback nearly eight hundred miles to
his destination. Gallatin, himself a Western man, describes

Jackson as he entered the halls of Congress: "A tall, lank,
uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging
over his face and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin;
his dress singular; his manners those of a rough backwoodsman."
And Jefferson testified: "When I was President of
the Senate he was a Senator, and he could never speak on
account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him
attempt it repeatedly and as often choke with rage." At last
the frontier in the person of its typical man had found a
place in the Government. This six-foot backwoodsman, with
blue eyes that could blaze on occasion, this choleric, impetuous,
self-willed Scotch-Irish leader of men, this expert duelist,
and ready fighter, this embodiment of the tenacious, vehement,
personal West, was in politics to stay. The frontier
democracy of that time had the instincts of the clansman in
the days of Scotch border warfare. Vehement and tenacious
as the democracy was, strenuously as each man contended with
his neighbor for the spoils of the new country that opened
before them, they all had respect for the man who best
expressed their aspirations and their ideas. Every community
had its hero. In the War of 1812 and the subsequent
Indian fighting Jackson made good his claim, not only to the
loyalty of the people of Tennessee, but of the whole West,
and even of the nation. He had the essential traits of the
Kentucky and Tennessee frontier. It was a frontier free from
the influence of European ideas and institutions. The men
of the "Western World" turned their backs upon the Atlantic
Ocean, and with a grim energy and self-reliance began to
build up a society free from the dominance of ancient forms.

The Westerner defended himself and resented governmental
restrictions. The duel and the blood-feud found congenial
soil in Kentucky and Tennessee. The idea of the personality
of law was often dominant over the organized machinery of

justice. That method was best which was most direct and
effective. The backwoodsman was intolerant of men who split
hairs, or scrupled over the method of reaching the right. In
a word, the unchecked development of the individual was
the significant product of this frontier democracy. It sought
rather to express itself by choosing a man of the people,
than by the formation of elaborate governmental institutions.

It was because Andrew Jackson personified these essential
Western traits that in his presidency he became the idol and
the mouthpiece of the popular will. In his assault upon the
Bank as an engine of aristocracy, and in his denunciation of
nullification, he went directly to his object with the ruthless
energy of a frontiersman. For formal law and the subleties
of State sovereignty he had the contempt of a backwoodsman.
Nor is it without significance that this typical man of the new
democracy will always be associated with the triumph of the
spoils system in national politics. To the new democracy
of the West, office was an opportunity to exercise natural
rights as an equal citizen of the community. Rotation in
office served not simply to allow the successful man to punish
his enemies and reward his friends, but it also furnished the
training in the actual conduct of political affairs which every
American claimed as his birthright. Only in a primitive
democracy of the type of the United States in 1830 could such
a system have existed without the ruin of the State. National
government in that period was no complex and nicely adjusted
machine, and the evils of the system were long in making
themselves fully apparent.

The triumph of Andrew Jackson marked the end of the old
era of trained statesmen for the Presidency. With him began
the era of the popular hero. Even Martin Van Buren, whom
we think of in connection with the East, was born in a log

house under conditions that were not unlike parts of the
older West. Harrison was the hero of the Northwest, as
Jackson had been of the Southwest. Polk was a typical
Tennesseean, eager to expand the nation, and Zachary Taylor
was what Webster called a "frontier colonel." During the
period that followed Jackson, power passed from the region
of Kentucky and Tennessee to the border of the Mississippi.
The natural democratic tendencies that had earlier shown
themselves in the Gulf States were destroyed, however, by
the spread of cotton culture, and the development of great
plantations in that region. What had been typical of the
democracy of the Revolutionary frontier and of the frontier
of Andrew Jackson was now to be seen in the States between
the Ohio and the Mississippi. As Andrew Jackson is the
typical democrat of the former region, so Abraham Lincoln
is the very embodiment of the pioneer period of the Old
Northwest. Indeed, he is the embodiment of the democracy
of the West. How can one speak of him except in the words
of Lowell's great" Commemoration Ode":—

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

The pioneer life from which Lincoln came differed in important
respects from the frontier democracy typified by Andrew
Jackson. Jackson's democracy was contentious, individualis-,
tic, and it sought the ideal of local self-government and expansion.
Lincoln represents rather the pioneer folk who entered
the forest of the great Northwest to chop out a home, to build
up their fortunes in the midst of a continually ascending industrial
movement. In the democracy of the Southwest, industrial
development and city life were only minor factors, but
to the democracy of the Northwest they were its very life.
To widen the area of the clearing, to contend with one another
for the mastery of the industrial resources of the rich provinces,
to struggle for a place in the ascending movement of
society, to transmit to one's offspring the chance for education,
for industrial betterment, for the rise in life which the
hardships of the pioneer existence denied to the pioneer himself,
these were some of the ideals of the region to which Lincoln
came. The men were commonwealth builders, industry
builders. Whereas the type of hero in the Southwest was
militant, in the Northwest he was industrial. It was in the
midst of these "plain people," as he loved to call them, that
Lincoln grew to manhood. As Emerson says: "He is the true
history of the American people in his time." The years of
his early life were the years when the democracy of the Northwest
came into struggle with the institution of slavery which
threatened to forbid the expansion of the democratic pioneer
life in the West. In President Eliot's essay on "Five American
Contributions to Civilization," he instances as one of the
supreme tests of American democracy its attitude upon the
question of slavery. But if democracy chose wisely and
worked effectively toward the solution of this problem, it
must be remembered that Western democracy took the lead.

The rail-splitter himself became the nation's President in that
fierce time of struggle, and armies of the woodsmen and pioneer
farmers recruited in the Old Northwest made free the
Father of Waters, marched through Georgia, and helped to
force the struggle to a conclusion at Appomattox. The free
pioneer democracy struck down the slave-holding aristocracy
on its march to the West.

The last chapter in the development of Western democracy
is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces
of the new West. At each new stage of Western development,
the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger
combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans
that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the
State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that
followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied
a region as large as the parent State. The area which
settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of
northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had become
accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of the
East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the
West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their
former experience. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great
Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri,
furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement
of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give
way to coöperation and to governmental activity. Even in the
earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness,
demands had been made upon the government for support in
internal improvements, but this new West showed a growing
tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of national
authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast public

domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to States
for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation
lines.

Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen
years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions
have presented themselves which have accelerated the social
tendency of Western democracy. The pioneer farmer of
the days of Lincoln could place his family on a flatboat,
strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with little
or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial independence.
Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it
possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although
the factor of transportation made a serious and increasing
impediment to the free working-out of his individual career.
But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the
Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old
individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works
must be constructed, coöperative activity was demanded in
utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the
small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic
province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier
should be social rather than individual.

Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the
democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the
marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power
are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for
the production of captains of industry. The old democratic
admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the
rights of competitive individual development, together with
the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest
of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of
mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries
which in our own decade have marked the West.

Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the
development of Western democracy in the different areas
which it has conquered. There has been a steady development
of the industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the
social tendency, in this later movement of Western democracy.
While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent
in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved
as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling
each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster
areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary
to combine under the leadership of the strongest. This
is the explanation of the rise of those preëminent captains of
industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the
fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the way of
recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that
have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors
which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall
have to mention at least the following:—

Most important of all has been the fact that an area of
free land has continually lain on the western border of the
settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions
tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to
press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom
of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions
of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism,
economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would
not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social
subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality
was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under
oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he
might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the
building of free cities and free States on the lines of his
own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities.

Their existence has differentiated the American
democracy from the democracies which have preceded it,
because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of highly
specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it
kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and
reaction these two forces have shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial
resources have existed over such vast spaces that they
have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design
and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted
with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the
tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements
which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of
politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance
of this training upon democracy. Never before in the
history of the world has a democracy existed on so vast an
area and handled things in the gross with such success, with
such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of
execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of
the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude.
The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive
economic conditions.

But the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast
areas, under the conditions of free competition furnished by
the West, has produced the rise of those captains of industry
whose success in consolidating economic power now raises
the question as to whether democracy under such conditions
can survive. For the old military type of Western leaders
like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry
Harrison have been substituted such industrial leaders as
James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.

The question is imperative, then, What ideals persist from
this democratic experience of the West; and have they acquired

sufficient momentum to sustain themselves under conditions so
radically unlike those in the days of their origin? In other
words, the question put at the beginning of this discussion
becomes pertinent. Under the forms of the American democracy
is there in reality evolving such a concentration of economic
and social power in the hands of a comparatively few
men as may make political democracy an appearance rather
than a reality? The free lands are gone. The material forces
that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing away. It
is to the realm of the spirit, to the domain of ideals and legislation,
that we must look for Western influence upon democracy
in our own days.

Western democracy has been from the time of its birth
idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men
as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the
story of man's struggle for a higher type of society. The
Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted
the richest free gift that was ever spread out before
civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World,
bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as
inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life
and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into
the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and
that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the
scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after his
will." Never again can such an opportunity come to the
sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so
much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend
its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity
has made America the goal of idealists from the days
of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the
pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant
lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably

present. Kipling's "Song of the English" has given
it expression:—

This was the vision that called to Roger Williams,—that
" prophetic soul ravished of truth disembodied," "unable to
enter into treaty with its environment," and forced to seek
the wilderness. "Oh, how sweet," wrote William Penn, from
his forest refuge, "is the quiet of these parts, freed from the
troubles and perplexities of woeful Europe." And here he
projected what he called his "Holy Experiment in Government."

If the later West offers few such striking illustrations of
the relation of the wilderness to idealistic schemes, and if
some of the designs were fantastic and abortive, none the
less the influence is a fact. Hardly a Western State but has
been the Mecca of some sect or band of social reformers,
anxious to put into practice their ideals, in vacant land, far
removed from the checks of a settled form of social organization.

Consider the Dunkards, the Icarians, the Fourierists,
the Mormons, and similar idealists who sought our Western
wilds. But the idealistic influence is not limited to the
dreamers' conception of a new State. It gave to the pioneer
farmer and city builder a restless energy, a quick capacity
for judgment and action, a belief in liberty, freedom of opportunity,
and a resistance to the domination of class which
infused a vitality and power into the individual atoms of this
democratic mass. Even as he dwelt among the stumps of his
newly-cut clearing, the pioneer had the creative vision of a new
order of society. In imagination he pushed back the forest
boundary to the confines of a mighty Commonwealth; he willed
that log cabins should become the lofty buildings of great
cities. He decreed that his children should enter into a heritage
of education, comfort, and social welfare, and for this
ideal he bore the scars of the wilderness. Possessed with this
idea he ennobled his task and laid deep foundations for a
democratic State. Nor was this idealism by any means limited
to the American pioneer.

To the old native democratic stock has been added a vast
army of recruits from the Old World. There are in the
Middle West alone four million persons of German parentage
out of a total of seven millions in the country. Over a million
persons of Scandinavian parentage live in the same region.
The democracy of the newer West is deeply affected by the
ideals brought by these immigrants from the Old World. To
them America was not simply a new home; it was a land of
opportunity, of freedom, of democracy. It meant to them,
as to the American pioneer that preceded them, the opportunity
to destroy the bonds of social caste that bound them in
their older home, to hew out for themselves in a new country
a destiny proportioned to the powers that God had given them,
a chance to place their families under better conditions and

to win a larger life than the life that they had left behind.
He who believes that even the hordes of recent immigrants
from southern Italy are drawn to these shores by nothing more
than a dull and blind materialism has not penetrated into the
heart of the problem. The idealism and expectation of these
children of the Old World, the hopes which they have formed
for a newer and freer life across the seas, are almost pathetic
when one considers how far they are from the possibility of
fruition. He who would take stock of American democracy
must not forget the accumulation of human purposes and
ideals which immigration has added to the American populace.

In this connection it must also be remembered that these
democratic ideals have existed at each stage of the advance
of the frontier, and have left behind them deep and enduring
effects on the thinking of the whole country. Long after the
frontier period of a particular region of the United States
has passed away, the conception of society, the ideals and
aspirations which it produced, persist in the minds of the
people. So recent has been the transition of the greater portion
of the United States from frontier conditions to conditions
of settled life, that we are, over the large portion of
the United States, hardly a generation removed from the
primitive conditions of the West. If, indeed, we ourselves
were not pioneers, our fathers were, and the inherited ways
of looking at things, the fundamental assumptions of the
American people, have all been shaped by this experience of
democracy on its westward march. This experience has been
wrought into the very warp and woof of American thought.

Even those masters of industry and capital who have risen
to power by the conquest of Western resources came from
the midst of this society and still profess its principles. John
D. Rockefeller was born on a New York farm, and began

his career as a young business man in St. Louis Marcus
Hanna was a Cleveland grocer's clerk at the age of twenty.
Claus Spreckles, the sugar king, came from Germany as a
steerage passenger to the United States in 1848. Marshall
Field was a farmer boy in Conway, Massachusetts, until he
left to grow up with the young Chicago. Andrew Carnegie
came as a ten-year-old boy from Scotland to Pittsburgh, then
a distinctively Western town. He built up his fortunes through
successive grades until he became the dominating factor in
the great iron industries, and paved the way for that colossal
achievement, the Steel Trust. Whatever may be the tendencies
of this corporation, there can be little doubt of the democratic
ideals of Mr. Carnegie himself. With lavish hand he
has strewn millions through the United States for the promotion
of libraries. The effect of this library movement in
perpetuating the democracy that comes from an intelligent
and self-respecting people can hardly be measured. In his
"Triumphant Democracy," published in 1886, Mr. Carnegie
the ironmaster, said, in reference to the mineral wealth of the
United States: "Thank God, these treasures are in the hands
of an intelligent people, the Democracy, to be used for the
general good of the masses, and not made the spoils of monarchs,
courts, and aristocracy, to be turned to the base and
selfish ends of a privileged hereditary class." It would be
hard to find a more rigorous assertion of democratic doctrine
than the celebrated utterance, attributed to the same man
that he should feel it a disgrace to die rich.

In enumerating the services of American democracy, President
Eliot included the corporation as one of its achievements
declaring that "freedom of incorporation, though no longer
exclusively a democratic agency, has given a strong support
to democratic institutions." In one sense this is doubtless
true, since the corporation has been one of the means by

which small properties can be aggregated into an effective
working body. Socialistic writers have long been fond of
pointing out also that these various concentrations pave the
way for and make possible social control. From this point
of view it is possible that the masters of industry may prove
to be not so much an incipient aristocracy as the pathfinders
for democracy in reducing the industrial world to systematic
consolidation suited to democratic control. The great geniuses
that have built up the modern industrial concentration were
trained in the midst of democratic society. They were the
product of these democratic conditions. Freedom to rise was
the very condition of their existence. Whether they will be
followed by successors who will adopt the exploitation of the
masses, and who will be capable of retaining under efficient
control these vast resources, is one of the questions which we
shall have to face.

This, at least, is clear: American democracy is fundamentally
the outcome of the experiences of the American people
in dealing with the West. Western, democracy through the
whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a
society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom
of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility,
and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the
masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy,
and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies
of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to
create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem
of the United States is not to create democracy, but to
conserve democratic institutions and ideals. In the later
period of its development, Western democracy has been gaining
experience in the problem of social control. It has steadily
enlarged the sphere of its action and the instruments for
its perpetuation. By its system of public schools, from the

grades to the graduate work of the great universities, the West
has created a larger single body of intelligent plain people
than can be found elsewhere in the world. Its political tendencies,
whether we consider Democracy, Populism, or Republicanism,
are distinctly in the direction of greater social control
and the conservation of the old democratic ideals.

To these ideals the West adheres with even a passionate
determination. If, in working out its mastery of the resources
of the interior, it has produced a type of industrial
leader so powerful as to be the wonder of the world, nevertheless,
it is still to be determined whether these men constitute
a menace to democratic institutions, or the most efficient
factor for adjusting democratic control to the new conditions.

Whatever shall be the outcome of the rush of this huge industrial
modern United States to its place among the nations of
the earth, the formation of its Western democracy will always
remain one of the wonderful chapters in the history of the
human race. Into this vast shaggy continent of ours poured
the first feeble tide of European settlement. European men,
institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American wilderness,
and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught
them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common
man, trained them in adaptation to the conditions of the New
World, to the creation of new institutions to meet new needs;
and ever as society on her eastern border grew to resemble
the Old World in its social forms and its industry, ever, as it
began to lose faith in the ideals of democracy, she opened
new provinces, and dowered new democracies in her most distant
domains with her material treasures and with the ennobling
influence that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that
came from hewing out a home, making a school and a church,
and creating a higher future for his family, furnished to the
pioneer.

She gave to the world such types as the farmer Thomas
Jefferson, with his Declaration of Independence, his statute
for religious toleration, and his purchase of Louisiana. She
gave us Andrew Jackson, that fierce Tennessee spirit who
broke down the traditions of conservative rule, swept away the
privacies and privileges of officialdom, and, like a Gothic
leader, opened the temple of the nation to the populace.
She gave us Abraham Lincoln, whose gaunt frontier form
and gnarled, massive hand told of the conflict with the forest,
whose grasp of the ax-handle of the pioneer was no firmer
than his grasp of the helm of the ship of state as it breasted
the seas of civil war. She has furnished to this new democracy
her stores of mineral wealth, that dwarf of those of the
Old World, and her provinces that in themselves are vaster
and more productive than most of the nations of Europe.
Out of her bounty has come a nation whose industrial competition
alarms the Old World, and the masters of whose
resources wield wealth and power vaster than the wealth and
power of kings. Best of all, the West gave, not only to the
American, but to the unhappy and oppressed of all lands, a
vision of hope, and assurance that the world held a place
where were to be found high faith in man and the will and
power to furnish him the opportunity to grow to the full measure
of his own capacity. Great and powerful as are the new
sons of her loins, the Republic is greater than they. The
paths of the pioneer have widened into broad highways. The
forest clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths.
Let us see to it that the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin
shall enlarge into the spiritual life of a democracy where
civic power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement
for the common good.