XI

THE WEST AND AMERICAN IDEALS[290:1]

True to American traditions that each succeeding generation ought to find in the Republic a better home, once in every year the colleges and universities summon the nation to lift its eyes from the routine of work, in order to take stock of the country's purposes and achievements, to examine its past and consider its future.

This attitude of self-examination is hardly characteristic of the people as a whole. Particularly it is not characteristic of the historic American. He has been an opportunist rather than a dealer in general ideas. Destiny set him in a current which bore him swiftly along through such a wealth of opportunity that reflection and well-considered planning seemed wasted time. He knew not where he was going, but he was on his way, cheerful, optimistic, busy and buoyant.

To-day we are reaching a changed condition, less apparent perhaps, in the newer regions than in the old, but sufficiently obvious to extend the commencement frame of mind from the college to the country as a whole. The swift and inevitable current of the upper reaches of the nation's history has borne it to the broader expanse and slower stretches which mark the nearness of the level sea. The vessel, no longer carried along by the rushing waters, finds it necessary to determine its own directions on this new ocean of its future, to give conscious consideration to its motive power and to its steering gear.

It matters not so much that those who address these college men and women upon life, give conflicting answers to the questions of whence and whither: the pause for remembrance, for reflection and for aspiration is wholesome in itself.

Although the American people are becoming more self-conscious, more responsive to the appeal to act by deliberate choices, we should be over-sanguine if we believed that even in this new day these commencement surveys were taken to heart by the general public, or that they were directly and immediately influential upon national thought and action.

But even while we check our enthusiasm by this realization of the common thought, we must take heart. The University's peculiar privilege and distinction lie in the fact that it is not the passive instrument of the State to voice its current ideas. Its problem is not that of expressing tendencies. Its mission is to create tendencies and to direct them. Its problem is that of leadership and of ideals. It is called, of course, to justify the support which the public gives it, by working in close and sympathetic touch with those it serves. More than that, it would lose important element of strength if it failed to recognize the fact that improvement and creative movement often come from the masses themselves, instinctively moving toward a better order. The University's graduates must be fitted to take their places naturally and effectually in the common life of the time.

But the University is called especially to justify its existence by giving to its sons and daughters something which they could not well have gotten through the ordinary experiences of the life outside its walls. It is called to serve the time by independent research and by original thought. If it were a mere recording instrument of conventional opinion and average information, it is hard to see why the University should exist at all. To clasp hands with the common life in order that it may lift that life, to be a radiant center enkindling the society in which it has its being, these are primary duties of the University. Fortunate the State which gives free play to this spirit of inquiry. Let it "grubstake" its intellectual prospectors and send them forth where "the trails run out and stop." A famous scientist holds that the universal ether bears vital germs which impinging upon a dead world would bring life to it. So, at least it is, in the world of thought, where energized ideals put in the air and carried here and there by the waves and currents of the intellectual atmosphere, fertilize vast inert areas.

The University, therefore, has a double duty. On the one hand it must aid in the improvement of the general economic and social environment. It must help on in the work of scientific discovery and of making such conditions of existence, economic, political and social, as will produce more fertile and responsive soil for a higher and better life. It must stimulate a wider demand on the part of the public for right leadership. It must extend its operations more widely among the people and sink deeper shafts through social strata to find new supplies of intellectual gold in popular levels yet untouched. And on the other hand, it must find and fit men and women for leadership. It must both awaken new demands and it must satisfy those demands by trained leaders with new motives, with new incentives to ambition, with higher and broader conception of what constitute the prize in life, of what constitutes success. The University has to deal with both the soil and sifted seed in the agriculture of the human spirit.

Its efficiency is not the efficiency which the business engineer is fitted to appraise. If it is a training ship, it is a training ship bound on a voyage of discovery, seeking new horizons. The economy of the University's consumption can only be rightly measured by the later times which shall possess those new realms of the spirit which its voyage shall reveal. If the ships of Columbus had engaged in a profitable coastwise traffic between Palos and Cadiz they might have saved sail cloth, but their keels would never have grated on the shores of a New World.

The appeal of the undiscovered is strong in America. For three centuries the fundamental process in its history was the westward movement, the discovery and occupation of the vast free spaces of the continent. We are the first generation of Americans who can look back upon that era as a historic movement now coming to its end. Other generations have been so much a part of it that they could hardly comprehend its significance. To them it seemed inevitable. The free land and the natural resources seemed practically inexhaustible. Nor were they aware of the fact that their most fundamental traits, their institutions, even their ideals were shaped by this interaction between the wilderness and themselves.

American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier. Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire.

To-day we are looking with a shock upon a changed world. The national problem is no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest; it is how to save and wisely use the remaining timber. It is no longer how to get the great spaces of fertile prairie land in humid zones out of the hands of the government into the hands of the pioneer; these lands have already passed into private possession. No longer is it a question of how to avoid or cross the Great Plains and the arid desert. It is a question of how to conquer those rejected lands by new method of farming and by cultivating new crops from seed collected by the government and by scientists from the cold, dry steppes of Siberia, the burning sands of Egypt, and the remote interior of China. It is a problem of how to bring the precious rills of water on to the alkali and sage brush. Population is increasing faster than the food supply.

New farm lands no longer increase decade after decade in areas equal to those of European states. While the ratio of increase of improved land declines, the value of farm lands rise and the price of food leaps upward, reversing the old ratio between the two. The cry of scientific farming and the conservation of natural resources replaces the cry of rapid conquest of the wilderness. We have so far won our national home, wrested from it its first rich treasures, and drawn to it the unfortunate of other lands, that we are already obliged to compare ourselves with settled states of the Old World. In place of our attitude of contemptuous indifference to the legislation of such countries as Germany and England, even Western States like Wisconsin send commissions to study their systems of taxation, workingmen's insurance, old age pensions and a great variety of other remedies for social ills.

If we look about the periphery of the nation, everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing. On the streets of Northeastern cities like New York and Boston, the faces which we meet are to a surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe. Puritan New England, which turned its capital into factories and mills and drew to its shores an army of cheap labor, governed these people for a time by a ruling class like an upper stratum between which and the lower strata there was no assimilation. There was no such evolution into an assimilated commonwealth as is seen in Middle Western agricultural States, where immigrant and old native stock came in together and built up a homogeneous society on the principle of give and take. But now the Northeastern coast finds its destiny, politically and economically, passing away from the descendants of the Puritans. It is the little Jewish boy, the Greek or the Sicilian, who takes the traveler through historic streets, now the home of these newer people to the Old North Church or to Paul Revere's house, or to Tea Wharf, and tells you in his strange patois the story of revolution against oppression.

Along the Southern Atlantic and the Gulf coast, in spite of the preservative influence of the negro, whose presence has always called out resistance to change on the part of the whites, the forces of social and industrial transformation are at work. The old tidewater aristocracy has surrendered to the up-country democrats. Along the line of the Alleghanies like an advancing column, the forces of Northern capital, textile and steel mills, year after year extend their invasion into the lower South. New Orleans, once the mistress of the commerce of the Mississippi Valley, is awakening to new dreams of world commerce. On the southern border, similar invasions of American capital have been entering Mexico. At the same time, the opening of the Panama Canal has completed the dream of the ages of the Straits of Anian between Atlantic and Pacific. Four hundred years ago, Balboa raised the flag of Spain at the edge of the Sea of the West and we are now preparing to celebrate both that anniversary, and the piercing of the continent. New relations have been created between Spanish America and the United States and the world is watching the mediation of Argentina, Brazil and Chile between the contending forces of Mexico and the Union. Once more alien national interests lie threatening at our borders, but we no longer appeal to the Monroe Doctrine and send our armies of frontiersmen to settle our concerns off-hand. We take council with European nations and with the sisterhood of South America, and propose a remedy of social reorganization in place of imperious will and force. Whether the effort will succeed or not, it is a significant indication that an old order is passing away, when such a solution is undertaken by a President of Scotch Presbyterian stock, born in the State of Virginia.

If we turn to the Northern border, where we are about to celebrate a century of peace with England, we see in progress, like a belated procession of our own history the spread of pioneers, the opening of new wildernesses, the building of new cities, the growth of a new and mighty nation. That old American advance of the wheat farmer from the Connecticut to the Mohawk, and the Genesee, from the Great Valley of Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley and the prairies of the Middle West, is now by its own momentum and under the stimulus of Canadian homesteads and the high price of wheat, carried across the national border to the once lone plains where the Hudson Bay dog trains crossed the desolate snows of the wild North Land. In the Pacific Northwest the era of construction has not ended, but it is so rapidly in progress that we can already see the closing of the age of the pioneer. Already Alaska beckons on the north, and pointing to her wealth of natural resources asks the nation on what new terms the new age will deal with her. Across the Pacific looms Asia, no longer a remote vision and a symbol of the unchanging, but borne as by mirage close to our shores and raising grave questions of the common destiny of the people of the ocean. The dreams of Benton and of Seward of a regenerated Orient, when the long march of westward civilization should complete its circle, seem almost to be in process of realization. The age of the Pacific Ocean begins, mysterious and unfathomable in its meaning for our own future.

Turning to view the interior, we see the same picture of change. When the Superintendent of the Census in 1890 declared the frontier line no longer traceable, the beginning of the rush into Oklahoma had just occurred. Here where the broken fragments of Indian nations from the East had been gathered and where the wilder tribes of the Southwest were being settled, came the rush of the land-hungry pioneer. Almost at a blow the old Indian territory passed away, populous cities came into being and it was not long before gushing oil wells made a new era of sudden wealth. The farm lands of the Middle West taken as free homesteads or bought for a mere pittance, have risen so in value that the original owners have in an increasing degree either sold them in order to reinvest in the newer cheap lands of the West, or have moved into the town and have left the tillage to tenant farmers. The growth of absentee ownership of the soil is producing a serious problem in the former centers of the Granger and the Populist. Along the Old Northwest the Great Lakes are becoming a new Mediterranean Sea joining the realms of wheat and iron ore, at one end with the coal and furnaces of the forks of the Ohio, where the most intense and wide-reaching center of industrial energy exists. City life like that of the East, manufactures and accumulated capital, seem to be reproducing in the center of the Republic the tendencies already so plain on the Atlantic Coast.

Across the Great Plains where buffalo and Indian held sway successive industrial waves are passing. The old free range gave place to the ranch, the ranch to the homestead and now in places in the arid lands the homestead is replaced by the ten or twenty acre irrigated fruit farm. The age of cheap land, cheap corn and wheat, and cheap cattle has gone forever. The federal government has undertaken vast paternal enterprises of reclamation of the desert.

In the Rocky Mountains where at the time of Civil War, the first important rushes to gold and silver mines carried the frontier backward on a march toward the east, the most amazing transformations have occurred. Here, where prospectors made new trails, and lived the wild free life of mountain men, here where the human spirit seemed likely to attain the largest measure of individual freedom, and where fortune beckoned to the common man, have come revolutions wrought by the demand for organized industry and capital. In the regions where the popular tribunal and the free competitive life flourished, we have seen law and order break down in the unmitigated collision of great aggregations of capital, with each other and with organized socialistic labor. The Cripple Creek strikes, the contests at Butte, the Goldfield mobs, the recent Colorado fighting, all tell a similar story,--the solid impact of contending forces in regions where civic power and loyalty to the State have never fully developed. Like the Grand Cañon, where in dazzling light the huge geologic history is written so large that none may fail to read it, so in the Rocky Mountains the dangers of modern American industrial tendencies have been exposed.

As we crossed the Cascades on our way to Seattle, one of the passengers was moved to explain his feeling on the excellence of Puget Sound in contrast with the remaining visible Universe. He did it well in spite of irreverent interruptions from those fellow travelers who were unconverted children of the East, and at last he broke forth in passionate challenge, "Why should I not love Seattle! It took me from the slums of the Atlantic Coast, a poor Swedish boy with hardly fifteen dollars in my pocket. It gave me a home by the beautiful sea; it spread before my eyes a vision of snow-capped peaks and smiling fields; it brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I love it! If I were a multi-millionaire I would charter freight cars and carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern cities and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in our vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life really is!" And my heart was stirred by his words and by the whirling spaces of woods and peaks through which we passed.

But as I looked and listened to this passionate outcry, I remembered the words of Talleyrand, the exiled Bishop of Autun, in Washington's administration. Looking down from an eminence not far from Philadelphia upon a wilderness which is now in the heart of that huge industrial society where population presses on the means of life, even the cold-blooded and cynical Talleyrand, gazing on those unpeopled hills and forests, kindled with the vision of coming clearings, the smiling farms and grazing herds that were to be, the populous towns that should be built, the newer and finer social organization that should there arise. And then I remembered the hall in Harvard's museum of social ethics through which I pass to my lecture room when I speak on the history of the Westward movement. That hall is covered with an exhibit of the work in Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours of work, the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of the poor of all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that center of American industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy. As I enter my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men, "carving a cross on the wilderness rim," were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a brutal and degraded life. Irresistibly there rushed across my mind the memorable words of Huxley:

"Even the best of modern civilization appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express the opinion that, if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over Nature, which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation, among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation."

But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as we come to realize these changes, to strong men and women there is challenge and inspiration in them too. In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored. Let us hold to our attitude of faith and courage, and creative zeal. Let us dream as our fathers dreamt and let us make our dreams come true.

"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bear diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gifts after his will Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that hold them all. I, in my pleachéd garden watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples and the day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet, saw the scorn!"

What were America's "morning wishes"? From the beginning of that long westward march of the American people America has never been the home of mere contented materialism. It has continuously sought new ways and dreamed of a perfected social type.

In the fifteenth century when men dealt with the New World which Columbus found, the ideal of discovery was dominant. Here was placed within the reach of men whose ideas had been bounded by the Atlantic, new realms to be explored. America became the land of European dreams, its Fortunate Islands were made real, where, in the imagination of old Europe, peace and happiness, as well as riches and eternal youth, were to be found. To Sir Edwin Sandys and his friends of the London Company, Virginia offered an opportunity to erect the Republic for which they had longed in vain in England. To the Puritans, New England was the new land of freedom, wherein they might establish the institutions of God, according to their own faith. As the vision died away in Virginia toward the close of the seventeenth century, it was taken up anew by the fiery Bacon with his revolution to establish a real democracy in place of the rule of the planter aristocracy, that formed along the coast. Hardly had he been overthrown when in the eighteenth century, the democratic ideal was rejuvenated by the strong frontiersmen, who pressed beyond the New England Coast into the Berkshires and up the valleys of the Green Mountains of Vermont, and by the Scotch-Irish and German pioneers who followed the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into the Upland South. In both the Yankee frontiersmen and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the South, the Calvinistic conception of the importance of the individual, bound by free covenant to his fellow men and to God, was a compelling influence, and all their wilderness experience combined to emphasize the ideals of opening new ways, of giving freer play to the individual, and of constructing democratic society.

When the backwoodsmen crossed the Alleghanies they put between themselves and the Atlantic Coast a barrier which seemed to separate them from a region already too much like the Europe they had left, and as they followed the courses of the rivers that flowed to the Mississippi, they called themselves "Men of the Western Waters," and their new home in the Mississippi Valley was the "Western World." Here, by the thirties, Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the faith of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his own place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government. But while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights, it was also loyal to leadership as the very name implies. It was ready to follow to the uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were frontier fighter or president, and it even rebuked and limited its own legislative representatives and recalled its senators when they ran counter to their chosen executive. Jacksonian democracy was essentially rural. It was based on the good fellowship and genuine social feeling of the frontier, in which classes and inequalities of fortune played little part. But it did not demand equality of condition, for there was abundance of natural resources and the belief that the self-made man had a right to his success in the free competition which western life afforded, was as prominent in their thought as was the love of democracy. On the other hand, they viewed governmental restraints with suspicion as a limitation on their right to work out their own individuality.

For the banking institutions and capitalists of the East they had an instinctive antipathy. Already they feared that the "money power" as Jackson called it, was planning to make hewers of wood and drawers of water of the common people.

In this view they found allies among the labor leaders of the East, who in the same period began their fight for better conditions of the wage earner. These Locofocos were the first Americans to demand fundamental social changes for the benefit of the workers in the cities. Like the Western pioneers, they protested against monopolies and special privilege. But they also had a constructive policy, whereby society was to be kept democratic by free gifts of the public land, so that surplus labor might not bid against itself, but might find an outlet in the West. Thus to both the labor theorist and the practical pioneer, the existence of what seemed inexhaustible cheap land and unpossessed resources was the condition of democracy. In these years of the thirties and forties, Western democracy took on its distinctive form. Travelers like De Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, came to study and to report it enthusiastically to Europe.

Side by side with this westward marching army of individualistic liberty-loving democratic backwoodsmen, went a more northern stream of pioneers, who cherished similar ideas, but added to them the desire to create new industrial centers, to build up factories, to build railroads, and to develop the country by founding cities and extending prosperity. They were ready to call upon legislatures to aid in this, by subscriptions to stock, grants of franchises, promotion of banking and internal improvements. These were the Whig followers of that other Western leader, Henry Clay, and their early strength lay in the Ohio Valley, and particularly among the well-to-do. In the South their strength was found among the aristocracy of the Cotton Kingdom.

Both of these Western groups, Whigs and Democrats alike, had one common ideal: the desire to leave their children a better heritage than they themselves had received, and both were fired with devotion to the ideal of creating in this New World a home more worthy of mankind. Both were ready to break with the past, to boldly strike out new lines of social endeavor, and both believed in American expansion.

Before these tendencies had worked themselves out, three new forces entered. In the sudden extension of our boundaries to the Pacific Coast, which took place in the forties, the nation won so vast a domain that its resources seemed illimitable and its society seemed able to throw off all its maladies by the very presence of these vast new spaces. At the same period the great activity of railroad building to the Mississippi Valley occurred, making these lands available and diverting attention to the task of economic construction. The third influence was the slavery question which, becoming acute, shaped the American ideals and public discussion for nearly a generation. Viewed from one angle, this struggle involved the great question of national unity. From another it involved the question of the relations of labor and capital, democracy and aristocracy. It was not without significance that Abraham Lincoln became the very type of American pioneer democracy, the first adequate and elemental demonstration to the world that that democracy could produce a man who belonged to the ages.

After the war, new national energies were set loose, and new construction and development engaged the attention of the Westerners as they occupied prairies and Great Plains and mountains. Democracy and capitalistic development did not seem antagonistic.

With the passing of the frontier, Western social and political ideals took new form. Capital began to consolidate in even greater masses, and increasingly attempted to reduce to system and control the processes of industrial development. Labor with equal step organized its forces to destroy the old competitive system. It is not strange that the Western pioneers took alarm for their ideals of democracy as the outcome of the free struggle for the national resources became apparent. They espoused the cause of governmental activity.

It was a new gospel, for the Western radical became convinced that he must sacrifice his ideal of individualism and free competition in order to maintain his ideal of democracy. Under this conviction the Populist revised the pioneer conception of government. He saw in government no longer something outside of him, but the people themselves shaping their own affairs. He demanded therefore an extension of the powers of governments in the interest of his historic ideal of democratic society. He demanded not only free silver, but the ownership of the agencies of communication and transportation, the income tax, the postal savings bank, the provision of means of credit for agriculture, the construction of more effective devices to express the will of the people, primary nominations, direct elections, initiative, referendum and recall. In a word, capital, labor, and the Western pioneer, all deserted the ideal of competitive individualism in order to organize their interests in more effective combinations. The disappearance of the frontier, the closing of the era which was marked by the influence of the West as a form of society, brings with it new problems of social adjustment, new demands for considering our past ideals and our present needs.

Let us recall the conditions of the foreign relations along our borders, the dangers that wait us if we fail to unite in the solution of our domestic problems. Let us recall those internal evidences of the destruction of our old social order. If we take to heart this warning, we shall do well also to recount our historic ideals, to take stock of those purposes, and fundamental assumptions that have gone to make the American spirit and the meaning of America in world history.

First of all, there was the ideal of discovery, the courageous determination to break new paths, indifference to the dogma that because an institution or a condition exists, it must remain. All American experience has gone to the making of the spirit of innovation; it is in the blood and will not be repressed.

Then, there was the ideal of democracy, the ideal of a free self-directing people, responsive to leadership in the forming of programs and their execution, but insistent that the procedure should be that of free choice, not of compulsion.

But there was also the ideal of individualism. This democratic society was not a disciplined army, where all must keep step and where the collective interests destroyed individual will and work. Rather it was a mobile mass of freely circulating atoms, each seeking its own place and finding play for its own powers and for its own original initiative. We cannot lay too much stress upon this point, for it was at the very heart of the whole American movement. The world was to be made a better world by the example of a democracy in which there was freedom of the individual, in which there was the vitality and mobility productive of originality and variety.

Bearing in mind the far-reaching influence of the disappearance of unlimited resources open to all men for the taking, and considering the recoil of the common man when he saw the outcome of the competitive struggle for these resources as the supply came to its end over most of the nation, we can understand the reaction against individualism and in favor of drastic assertion of the powers of government. Legislation is taking the place of the free lands as the means of preserving the ideal of democracy. But at the same time it is endangering the other pioneer ideal of creative and competitive individualism. Both were essential and constituted what was best in America's contribution to history and to progress. Both must be preserved if the nation would be true to its past, and would fulfil its highest destiny. It would be a grave misfortune if these people so rich in experience, in self-confidence and aspiration, in creative genius, should turn to some Old World discipline of socialism or plutocracy, or despotic rule, whether by class or by dictator. Nor shall we be driven to these alternatives. Our ancient hopes, our courageous faith, our underlying good humor and love of fair play will triumph in the end. There will be give and take in all directions. There will be disinterested leadership, under loyalty to the best American ideals. Nowhere is this leadership more likely to arise than among the men trained in the Universities, aware of the promise of the past and the possibilities of the future. The times call for new ambitions and new motives.

In a most suggestive essay on the Problems of Modern Democracy, Mr. Godkin has said:

M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy; that democracy is generally content with mediocrity. But where is the proof of this? The incentive to exertion which is widest, most constant, and most powerful in its operations in all civilized countries, is the desire of distinction; and this may be composed either of love of fame or love of wealth or of both. In literary and artistic and scientific pursuits, sometimes the strongest influence is exerted by a love of the subject. But it may safely be said that no man has ever labored in any of the higher colleges to whom the applause and appreciation of his fellows was not one of the sweetest rewards of his exertions.

What is there we would ask, in the nature of democratic institutions, that should render this great spring of action powerless, that should deprive glory of all radiance, and put ambition to sleep? Is it not notorious, on the contrary, that one of the most marked peculiarities of democratic society, or of a society drifting toward democracy, is the fire of competition which rages in it, the fevered anxiety which possesses all its members to rise above the dead level to which the law is ever seeking to confine them, and by some brilliant stroke become something higher and more remarkable than their fellows? The secret of that great restlessness which is one of the most disagreeable accompaniments of life in democratic countries, is in fact due to the eagerness of everybody to grasp the prizes of which in aristocratic countries, only the few have much chance. And in no other society is success more worshiped, is distinction of any kind more widely flattered and caressed.

In democratic societies, in fact, excellence is the first title to distinction; in aristocratic ones there are two or three others which are far stronger and which must be stronger or aristocracy could not exist. The moment you acknowledge that the highest social position ought to be the reward of the man who has the most talent, you make aristocratic institutions impossible.

All that was buoyant and creative in American life would be lost if we gave up the respect for distinct personality, and variety in genius, and came to the dead level of common standards. To be "socialized into an average" and placed "under the tutelage of the mass of us," as a recent writer has put it, would be an irreparable loss. Nor is it necessary in a democracy, as these words of Godkin well disclose. What is needed is the multiplication of motives for ambition and the opening of new lines of achievement for the strongest. As we turn from the task of the first rough conquest of the continent there lies before us a whole wealth of unexploited resources in the realm of the spirit. Arts and letters, science and better social creation, loyalty and political service to the commonweal,--these and a thousand other directions of activity are open to the men, who formerly under the incentive of attaining distinction by amassing extraordinary wealth, saw success only in material display. Newer and finer careers will open to the ambitious when once public opinion shall award the laurels to those who rise above their fellows in these new fields of labor. It has not been the gold, but the getting of the gold, that has caught the imaginations of our captains of industry. Their real enjoyment lay not in the luxuries which wealth brought, but in the work of construction and in the place which society awarded them. A new era will come if schools and universities can only widen the intellectual horizon of the people, help to lay the foundations of a better industrial life, show them new goals for endeavor, inspire them with more varied and higher ideals.

The Western spirit must be invoked for new and nobler achievements. Of that matured Western spirit, Tennyson's Ulysses is a symbol.

". . . I am become a name For always roaming with an hungry heart, Much have I seen and known . . . I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch, where thro' Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

* * * * *

And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a shining star Beyond the utmost hound of human thought. . . . Come my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the Western stars until I die

* * * * *

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."

FOOTNOTES:

[290:1] Commencement Address, University of Washington, June 17, 1914. Reprinted by permission from The Washington Historical Quarterly, October, 1914.


XII

SOCIAL FORCES IN AMERICAN HISTORY[311:1]

The transformations through which the United States is passing in our own day are so profound, so far-reaching, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the birth of a new nation in America. The revolution in the social and economic structure of this country during the past two decades is comparable to what occurred when independence was declared and the constitution was formed, or to the changes wrought by the era which began half a century ago, the era of Civil War and Reconstruction.

These changes have been long in preparation and are, in part, the result of world-wide forces of reorganization incident to the age of steam production and large-scale industry, and, in part, the result of the closing of the period of the colonization of the West. They have been prophesied, and the course of the movement partly described by students of American development; but after all, it is with a shock that the people of the United States are coming to realize that the fundamental forces which have shaped their society up to the present are disappearing. Twenty years ago, as I have before had occasion to point out, the Superintendent of the Census declared that the frontier line, which its maps had depicted for decade after decade of the westward march of the nation, could no longer be described. To-day we must add that the age of free competition of individuals for the unpossessed resources of the nation is nearing its end. It is taking less than a generation to write the chapter which began with the disappearance of the line of the frontier--the last chapter in the history of the colonization of the United States, the conclusion to the annals of its pioneer democracy.

It is a wonderful chapter, this final rush of American energy upon the remaining wilderness. Even the bare statistics become eloquent of a new era. They no longer derive their significance from the exhibit of vast proportions of the public domain transferred to agriculture, of wildernesses equal to European nations changed decade after decade into the farm area of the United States. It is true there was added to the farms of the nation between 1870 and 1880 a territory equal to that of France, and between 1880 and 1900 a territory equal to the European area of France, Germany, England, and Wales combined. The records of 1910 are not yet available, but whatever they reveal they will not be so full of meaning as the figures which tell of upleaping wealth and organization and concentration of industrial power in the East in the last decade. As the final provinces of the Western empire have been subdued to the purposes of civilization and have yielded their spoils, as the spheres of operation of the great industrial corporations have extended, with the extension of American settlement, production and wealth have increased beyond all precedent.

The total deposits in all national banks have more than trebled in the present decade; the money in circulation has doubled since 1890. The flood of gold makes it difficult to gage the full meaning of the incredible increase in values, for in the decade ending with 1909 over 41,600,000 ounces of gold were mined in the United States alone. Over four million ounces have been produced every year since 1905, whereas between 1880 and 1894 no year showed a production of two million ounces. As a result of this swelling stream of gold and instruments of credit, aided by a variety of other causes, prices have risen until their height has become one of the most marked features and influential factors in American life, producing social readjustments and contributing effectively to party revolutions.

But if we avoid those statistics which require analysis because of the changing standard of value, we still find that the decade occupies an exceptional place in American history. More coal was mined in the United States in the ten years after 1897 than in all the life of the nation before that time.[313:1] Fifty years ago we mined less than fifteen million long tons of coal. In 1907 we mined nearly 429,000,000. At the present rate it is estimated that the supply of coal would be exhausted at a date no farther in the future than the formation of the constitution is in the past. Iron and coal are the measures of industrial power. The nation has produced three times as much iron ore in the past two decades as in all its previous history; the production of the past ten years was more than double that of the prior decade. Pig-iron production is admitted to be an excellent barometer of manufacture and of transportation. Never until 1898 had this reached an annual total of ten million long tons. But in the five years beginning with 1904 it averaged over twice that. By 1907 the United States had surpassed Great Britain, Germany, and France combined in the production of pig-iron and steel together, and in the same decade a single great corporation has established its domination over the iron mines and steel manufacture of the United States. It is more than a mere accident that the United States Steel Corporation with its stocks and bonds aggregating $1,400,000,000 was organized at the beginning of the present decade. The former wilderness about Lake Superior has, principally in the past two decades, established its position as overwhelmingly the preponderant source of iron ore, present and prospective, in the United States--a treasury from which Pittsburgh has drawn wealth and extended its unparalleled industrial empire in these years. The tremendous energies thus liberated at this center of industrial power in the United States revolutionized methods of manufacture in general, and in many indirect ways profoundly influenced the life of the nation.

Railroad statistics also exhibit unprecedented development, the formation of a new industrial society. The number of passengers carried one mile more than doubled between 1890 and 1908; freight carried one mile has nearly trebled in the same period and has doubled in the past decade. Agricultural products tell a different story. The corn crop has only risen from about two billion bushels in 1891 to two and seven-tenths billions in 1909; wheat from six hundred and eleven million bushels in 1891 to only seven hundred and thirty-seven million in 1909; and cotton from about nine million bales in 1891 to ten and three-tenths million bales in 1909. Population has increased in the United States proper from about sixty-two and one-half millions in 1890 to seventy-five and one-half millions in 1900 and to over ninety millions in 1910.

It is clear from these statistics that the ratio of the nation's increased production of immediate wealth by the enormously increased exploitation of its remaining natural resources vastly exceeds the ratio of increase of population and still more strikingly exceeds the ratio of increase of agricultural products. Already population is pressing upon the food supply while capital consolidates in billion-dollar organizations. The "Triumphant Democracy" whose achievements the iron-master celebrated has reached a stature even more imposing than he could have foreseen; but still less did he perceive the changes in democracy itself and the conditions of its life which have accompanied this material growth.

Having colonized the Far West, having mastered its internal resources, the nation turned at the conclusion of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century to deal with the Far East to engage in the world-politics of the Pacific Ocean. Having continued its historic expansion into the lands of the old Spanish empire by the successful outcome of the recent war, the United States became the mistress of the Philippines at the same time that it came into possession of the Hawaiian Islands, and the controlling influence in the Gulf of Mexico. It provided early in the present decade for connecting its Atlantic and Pacific coasts by the Isthmian Canal, and became an imperial republic with dependencies and protectorates--admittedly a new world-power, with a potential voice in the problems of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

This extension of power, this undertaking of grave responsibilities in new fields, this entry into the sisterhood of world-states, was no isolated event. It was, indeed, in some respects the logical outcome of the nation's march to the Pacific, the sequence to the era in which it was engaged in occupying the free lands and exploiting the resources of the West. When it had achieved this position among the nations of the earth, the United States found itself confronted, also, with the need of constitutional readjustment, arising from the relations of federal government and territorial acquisitions. It was obliged to reconsider questions of the rights of man and traditional American ideals of liberty and democracy, in view of the task of government of other races politically inexperienced and undeveloped.

If we turn to consider the effect upon American society and domestic policy in these two decades of transition we are met with palpable evidences of the invasion of the old pioneer democratic order. Obvious among them is the effect of unprecedented immigration to supply the mobile army of cheap labor for the centers of industrial life. In the past ten years, beginning with 1900, over eight million immigrants have arrived. The newcomers of the eight years since 1900 would, according to a writer in 1908, "repopulate all the five older New England States as they stand to-day; or, if properly disseminated over the newer parts of the country they would serve to populate no less than nineteen states of the Union as they stand." In 1907 "there were one and one-quarter million arrivals. This number would entirely populate both New Hampshire and Maine, two of our oldest States." "The arrivals of this one year would found a State with more inhabitants than any one of twenty-one of our other existing commonwealths which could be named." Not only has the addition to the population from Europe been thus extraordinary, it has come in increasing measure from southern and eastern Europe. For the year 1907, Professor Ripley,[316:1] whom I am quoting, has redistributed the incomers on the basis of physical type and finds that one-quarter of them were of the Mediterranean race, one-quarter of the Slavic race, one-eighth Jewish, and only one-sixth of the Alpine, and one-sixth of the Teutonic. In 1882 Germans had come to the amount of 250,000; in 1907 they were replaced by 330,000 South Italians. Thus it is evident that the ethnic elements of the United States have undergone startling changes; and instead of spreading over the nation these immigrants have concentrated especially in the cities and great industrial centers in the past decade. The composition of the labor class and its relation to wages and to the native American employer have been deeply influenced thereby; the sympathy of the employers with labor has been unfavorably affected by the pressure of great numbers of immigrants of alien nationality and of lower standards of life.

The familiar facts of the massing of population in the cities and the contemporaneous increase of urban power, and of the massing of capital and production in fewer and vastly greater industrial units, especially attest the revolution. "It is a proposition too plain to require elucidation," wrote Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury, in his report of 1827, "that the creation of capital is retarded rather than accelerated by the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface of soil."[317:1] Thirty years before Rush wrote these words Albert Gallatin declared in Congress that "if the cause of the happiness of this country were examined into, it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants which their citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions." Possibly both of these Pennsylvania financiers were right under the conditions of the time; but it is at least significant that capital and labor entered upon a new era as the end of the free lands approached. A contemporary of Gallatin in Congress had replied to the argument that cheap lands would depopulate the Atlantic coast by saying that if a law were framed to prevent ready access to western lands it would be tantamount to saying that there is some class which must remain "and by law be obliged to serve the others for such wages as they pleased to give." The passage of the arable public domain into private possession has raised this question in a new form and has brought forth new answers. This is peculiarly the era when competitive individualism in the midst of vast unappropriated opportunities changed into the monopoly of the fundamental industrial processes by huge aggregations of capital as the free lands disappeared. All the tendencies of the large-scale production of the twentieth century, all the trend to the massing of capital in large combinations, all of the energies of the age of steam, found in America exceptional freedom of action and were offered regions of activity equal to the states of all Western Europe. Here they reached their highest development.

The decade following 1897 is marked by the work of Mr. Harriman and his rivals in building up the various railroads into a few great groups, a process that had gone so far that before his death Mr. Harriman was ambitious to concentrate them all under his single control. High finance under the leadership of Mr. Morgan steadily achieved the consolidation of the greater industries into trusts or combinations and effected a community of interests between them and a few dominant banking organizations, with allied insurance companies and trust companies. In New York City have been centered, as never before, the banking reserves of the nation, and here, by the financial management of capital and speculative promotion, there has grown up a unified control over the nation's industrial life. Colossal private fortunes have arisen. No longer is the per capita wealth of the nation a real index to the prosperity of the average man. Labor on the other hand has shown an increasing self-consciousness, is combining and increasing its demands. In a word, the old pioneer individualism is disappearing, while the forces of social combination are manifesting themselves as never before. The self-made man has become, in popular speech, the coal baron, the steel king, the oil king, the cattle king, the railroad magnate, the master of high finance, the monarch of trusts. The world has never before seen such huge fortunes exercising combined control over the economic life of a people, and such luxury as has come out of the individualistic pioneer democracy of America in the course of competitive evolution.

At the same time the masters of industry, who control interests which represent billions of dollars, do not admit that they have broken with pioneer ideals. They regard themselves as pioneers under changed conditions, carrying on the old work of developing the natural resources of the nation, compelled by the constructive fever in their veins, even in ill-health and old age and after the accumulation of wealth beyond their power to enjoy, to seek new avenues of action and of power, to chop new clearings, to find new trails, to expand the horizon of the nation's activity, and to extend the scope of their dominion. "This country," said the late Mr. Harriman in an interview a few years ago, "has been developed by a wonderful people, flush with enthusiasm, imagination and speculative bent. . . . They have been magnificent pioneers. They saw into the future and adapted their work to the possibilities. . . . Stifle that enthusiasm, deaden that imagination and prohibit that speculation by restrictive and cramping conservative law, and you tend to produce a moribund and conservative people and country." This is an appeal to the historic ideals of Americans who viewed the republic as the guardian of individual freedom to compete for the control of the natural resources of the nation.

On the other hand, we have the voice of the insurgent West, recently given utterance in the New Nationalism of ex-President Roosevelt, demanding increase of federal authority to curb the special interests, the powerful industrial organizations, and the monopolies, for the sake of the conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of American democracy.

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary federal activity in limiting individual and corporate freedom for the benefit of society. To that decade belong the conservation congresses and the effective organization of the Forest Service, and the Reclamation Service. Taken together these developments alone would mark a new era, for over three hundred million acres are, as a result of this policy, reserved from entry and sale, an area more than equal to that of all the states which established the constitution, if we exclude their western claims; and these reserved lands are held for a more beneficial use of their forests, minerals, arid tracts, and water rights, by the nation as a whole. Another example is the extension of the activity of the Department of Agriculture, which seeks the remotest regions of the earth for crops suitable to the areas reclaimed by the government, maps and analyzes the soils, fosters the improvement of seeds and animals, tells the farmer when and how and what to plant, and makes war upon diseases of plants and animals and insect pests. The recent legislation for pure food and meat inspection, and the whole mass of regulative law under the Interstate Commerce clause of the constitution, further illustrates the same tendency.

Two ideals were fundamental in traditional American thought, ideals that developed in the pioneer era. One was that of individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for the resources of a continent--the squatter ideal. To the pioneer government was an evil. The other was the ideal of a democracy--"government of the people, by the people and for the people." The operation of these ideals took place contemporaneously with the passing into private possession of the free public domain and the natural resources of the United States. But American democracy was based on an abundance of free lands; these were the very conditions that shaped its growth and its fundamental traits. Thus time has revealed that these two ideals of pioneer democracy had elements of mutual hostility and contained the seeds of its dissolution. The present finds itself engaged in the task of readjusting its old ideals to new conditions and is turning increasingly to government to preserve its traditional democracy. It is not surprising that socialism shows noteworthy gains as elections continue; that parties are forming on new lines; that the demand for primary elections, for popular choice of senators, initiative, referendum, and recall, is spreading, and that the regions once the center of pioneer democracy exhibit these tendencies in the most marked degree. They are efforts to find substitutes for that former safeguard of democracy, the disappearing free lands. They are the sequence to the extinction of the frontier.

It is necessary next to notice that in the midst of all this national energy, and contemporaneous with the tendency to turn to the national government for protection to democracy, there is clear evidence of the persistence and the development of sectionalism.[321:1] Whether we observe the grouping of votes in Congress and in general elections, or the organization and utterances of business leaders, or the association of scholars, churches, or other representatives of the things of the spirit, we find that American life is not only increasing in its national intensity but that it is integrating by sections. In part this is due to the factor of great spaces which make sectional rather than national organization the line of least resistance; but, in part, it is also the expression of the separate economic, political, and social interests and the separate spiritual life of the various geographic provinces or sections. The votes on the tariff, and in general the location of the strongholds of the Progressive Republican movement, illustrate this fact. The difficulty of a national adjustment of railway rates to the diverse interests of different sections is another example. Without attempting to enter upon a more extensive discussion of sectionalism, I desire simply to point out that there are evidences that now, as formerly, the separate geographical interests have their leaders and spokesmen, that much Congressional legislation is determined by the contests, triumphs, or compromises between the rival sections, and that the real federal relations of the United States are shaped by the interplay of sectional with national forces rather than by the relation of State and Nation. As time goes on and the nation adjusts itself more durably to the conditions of the differing geographic sections which make it up, they are coming to a new self-consciousness and a revived self-assertion. Our national character is a composite of these sections.[322:1]

Obviously in attempting to indicate even a portion of the significant features of our recent history we have been obliged to take note of a complex of forces. The times are so close at hand that the relations between events and tendencies force themselves upon our attention. We have had to deal with the connections of geography, industrial growth, politics, and government. With these we must take into consideration the changing social composition, the inherited beliefs and habitual attitude of the masses of the people, the psychology of the nation and of the separate sections, as well as of the leaders. We must see how these leaders are shaped partly by their time and section, and how they are in part original, creative, by virtue of their own genius and initiative. We cannot neglect the moral tendencies and the ideals. All are related parts of the same subject and can no more be properly understood in isolation than the movement as a whole can be understood by neglecting some of these important factors, or by the use of a single method of investigation. Whatever be the truth regarding European history, American history is chiefly concerned with social forces, shaping and reshaping under the conditions of a nation changing as it adjusts to its environment. And this environment progressively reveals new aspects of itself, exerts new influences, and calls out new social organs and functions.

I have undertaken this rapid survey of recent history for two purposes. First, because it has seemed fitting to emphasize the significance of American development since the passing of the frontier, and, second, because in the observation of present conditions we may find assistance in our study of the past.

It is a familiar doctrine that each age studies its history anew and with interests determined by the spirit of the time. Each age finds it necessary to reconsider at least some portion of the past, from points of view furnished by new conditions which reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the previous generation. Unquestionably each investigator and writer is influenced by the times in which he lives and while this fact exposes the historian to a bias, at the same time it affords him new instruments and new insight for dealing with his subject.

If recent history, then, gives new meaning to past events, if it has to deal with the rise into a commanding position of forces, the origin and growth of which may have been inadequately described or even overlooked by historians of the previous generation, it is important to study the present and the recent past, not only for themselves but also as the source of new hypotheses, new lines of inquiry, new criteria of the perspective of the remoter past. And, moreover, a just public opinion and a statesmanlike treatment of present problems demand that they be seen in their historical relations in order that history may hold the lamp for conservative reform.

Seen from the vantage-ground of present developments what new light falls upon past events! When we consider what the Mississippi Valley has come to be in American life, and when we consider what it is yet to be, the young Washington, crossing the snows of the wilderness to summon the French to evacuate the portals of the great valley, becomes the herald of an empire. When we recall the huge industrial power that has centered at Pittsburgh, Braddock's advance to the forks of the Ohio takes on new meaning. Even in defeat, he opened a road to what is now the center of the world's industrial energy. The modifications which England proposed in 1794 to John Jay in the northwestern boundary of the United States from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, seemed to him, doubtless, significant chiefly as a matter of principle and as a question of the retention or loss of beaver grounds. The historians hardly notice the proposals. But they involved, in fact, the ownership of the richest and most extensive deposits of iron ore in America, the all-important source of a fundamental industry of the United States, the occasion for the rise of some of the most influential forces of our time.

What continuity and meaning are furnished by the outcome in present times of the movements of minor political parties and reform agitations! To the historian they have often seemed to be mere curious side eddies, vexatious distractions to the course of his literary craft as it navigated the stream of historical tendency. And yet, by the revelation of the present, what seemed to be side eddies have not seldom proven to be the concealed entrances to the main current, and the course which seemed the central one has led to blind channels and stagnant waters, important in their day, but cut off like oxbow lakes from the mighty river of historical progress by the mere permanent and compelling forces of the neglected currents.

We may trace the contest between the capitalist and the democratic pioneer from the earliest colonial days. It is influential in colonial parties. It is seen in the vehement protests of Kentucky frontiersmen in petition after petition to the Congress of the Confederation against the "nabobs" and men of wealth who took out titles to the pioneers' farms while they themselves were too busy defending those farms from the Indians to perfect their claims. It is seen in the attitude of the Ohio Valley in its backwoods days before the rise of the Whig party, as when in 1811 Henry Clay denounced the Bank of the United States as a corporation which throve on special privileges--"a special association of favored individuals taken from the mass of society, and invested with exemptions and surrounded by immunities and privileges." Benton voiced the same contest twenty years later when he denounced the bank as

a company of private individuals, many of them foreigners, and the mass of them residing in a remote and narrow corner of the Union, unconnected by any sympathy with the fertile regions of the Great Valley in which the natural power of this Union, the power of numbers, will be found to reside long before the renewed term of the second charter would expire.

"And where," he asked, "would all this power and money center? In the great cities of the Northeast, which have been for forty years and that by force of federal legislation, the lion's den of Southern and Western money--that den into which all the tracks point inward; from which the returning track of a solitary dollar has never yet been seen." Declaring, in words that have a very modern sound, that the bank tended to multiply nabobs and paupers, and that "a great moneyed power is favorable to great capitalists, for it is the principle of capital to favor capital," he appealed to the fact of the country's extent and its sectional divergences against the nationalizing of capital.

What a condition for a confederacy of states! What grounds for alarm and terrible apprehension when in a confederacy of such vast extent, so many rival commercial cities, so much sectional jealousy, such violent political parties, such fierce contests for power, there should be but one moneyed tribunal before which all the rival and contending elements must appear.

Even more vehement were the words of Jackson in 1837. "It is now plain," he wrote, "that the war is to be carried on by the monied aristocracy of the few against the democracy of numbers; the [prosperous] to make the honest laborers hewers of wood and drawers of water through the credit and paper system."

Van Buren's administration is usually passed hastily over with hardly more than mention of his Independent Treasury plan, and with particular consideration of the slavery discussion. But some of the most important movements in American social and political history began in these years of Jackson and Van Buren. Read the demands of the obscure labor papers and the reports of labor's open-air meetings anew, and you will find in the utterances of so-called labor visionaries and the Locofoco champions of "equal rights for all and special privileges for none," like Evans and Jacques, Byrdsall and Leggett, the finger points to the currents that now make the main channel of our history; you will find in them some of the important planks of the platforms of the triumphant parties of our own day. As Professor Commons has shown by his papers and the documents which he has published on labor history, an idealistic but widespread and influential humanitarian movement, strikingly similar to that of the present, arose in the years between 1830 and 1850, dealing with social forces in American life, animated by a desire to apply the public lands to social amelioration, eager to find new forms of democratic development. But the flood of the slavery struggle swept all of these movements into its mighty inundation for the time. After the war, other influences delayed the revival of the movement. The railroads opened the wide prairies after 1850 and made it easy to reach them; and decade after decade new sections were reduced to the purposes of civilization and to the advantages of the common man as well as the promotion of great individual fortunes. The nation centered its interests in the development of the West. It is only in our own day that this humanitarian democratic wave has reached the level of those earlier years. But in the meantime there are clear evidences of the persistence of the forces, even though under strange guise. Read the platforms of the Greenback-Labor, the Granger, and the Populist parties, and you will find in those platforms, discredited and reprobated by the major parties of the time, the basic proposals of the Democratic party after its revolution under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, and of the Republican party after its revolution by Mr. Roosevelt. The Insurgent movement is so clearly related to the areas and elements that gave strength to this progressive assertion of old democratic ideals with new weapons, that it must be regarded as the organized refusal of these persistent tendencies to be checked by the advocates of more moderate measures.

I have dealt with these fragments of party history, not, of course, with the purpose of expressing any present judgment upon them, but to emphasize and give concreteness to the fact that there is disclosed by present events a new significance to these contests of radical democracy and conservative interests; that they are rather a continuing expression of deep-seated forces than fragmentary and sporadic curios for the historical museum.

If we should survey the history of our lands from a similar point of view, considering the relations of legislation and administration of the public domain to the structure of American democracy, it would yield a return far beyond that offered by the formal treatment of the subject in most of our histories. We should find in the squatter doctrines and practices, the seizure of the best soils, the taking of public timber on the theory of a right to it by the labor expended on it, fruitful material for understanding the atmosphere and ideals under which the great corporations developed the West. Men like Senator Benton and Delegate Sibley in successive generations defended the trespasses of the pioneer and the lumberman upon the public forest lands, and denounced the paternal government that "harassed" these men, who were engaged in what we should call stealing government timber. It is evident that at some time between the middle of the nineteenth century and the present time, when we impose jail sentences upon Congressmen caught in such violations of the land laws, a change came over the American conscience and the civic ideals were modified. That our great industrial enterprises developed in the midst of these changing ideals is important to recall when we write the history of their activity.

We should find also that we cannot understand the land question without seeing its relations to the struggle of sections and classes bidding against each other and finding in the public domain a most important topic of political bargaining. We should find, too, that the settlement of unlike geographic areas in the course of the nation's progress resulted in changes in the effect of the land laws; that a system intended for the humid prairies was ill-adjusted to the grazing lands and coal fields and to the forests in the days of large-scale exploitation by corporations commanding great capital. Thus changing geographic factors as well as the changing character of the forces which occupied the public domain must be considered, if we would understand the bearing of legislation and policy in this field.[329:1] It is fortunate that suggestive studies of democracy and the land policy have already begun to appear.

The whole subject of American agriculture viewed in relation to the economic, political, and social life of the nation has important contributions to make. If, for example, we study the maps showing the transition of the wheat belt from the East to the West, as the virgin soils were conquered and made new bases for destructive competition with the older wheat States, we shall see how deeply they affected not only land values, railroad building, the movement of population, and the supply of cheap food, but also how the regions once devoted to single cropping of wheat were forced to turn to varied and intensive agriculture and to diversified industry, and we shall see also how these transformations affected party politics and even the ideals of the Americans of the regions thus changed. We shall find in the over-production of wheat in the provinces thus rapidly colonized, and in the over-production of silver in the mountain provinces which were contemporaneously exploited, important explanations of the peculiar form which American politics took in the period when Mr. Bryan mastered the Democratic party, just as we shall find in the opening of the new gold fields in the years immediately following, and in the passing of the era of almost free virgin wheat soils, explanations of the more recent period when high prices are giving new energy and aggressiveness to the demands of the new American industrial democracy.

Enough has been said, it may be assumed, to make clear the point which I am trying to elucidate, namely that a comprehension of the United States of to-day, an understanding of the rise and progress of the forces which have made it what it is, demands that we should rework our history from the new points of view afforded by the present. If this is done, it will be seen, for example, that the progress of the struggle between North and South over slavery and the freed negro, which held the principal place in American interest in the two decades after 1850, was, after all, only one of the interests in the time. The pages of the Congressional debates, the contemporary newspapers, the public documents of those twenty years, remain a rich mine for those who will seek therein the sources of movements dominant in the present day.

The final consideration to which I ask your attention in this discussion of social forces in American life, is with reference to the mode of investigating them and the bearing of these investigations upon the relations and the goal of history. It has become a precedent, fairly well established by the distinguished scholars who have held the office which I am about to lay down, to state a position with reference to the relations of history and its sister-studies, and even to raise the question of the attitude of the historian toward the laws of thermodynamics and to seek to find the key of historical development or of historical degradation. It is not given to all to bend the bow of Ulysses. I shall attempt a lesser task.

We may take some lessons from the scientist. He has enriched knowledge especially in recent years by attacking the no-man's lands left unexplored by the too sharp delimitation of spheres of activity. These new conquests have been especially achieved by the combination of old sciences. Physical chemistry, electro-chemistry, geo-physics, astro-physics, and a variety of other scientic unions have led to audacious hypotheses, veritable flashes of vision, which open new regions of activity for a generation of investigators. Moreover they have promoted such investigations by furnishing new instruments of research. Now in some respects there is an analogy between geology and history. The new geologist aims to describe the inorganic earth dynamically in terms of natural law, using chemistry, physics, mathematics, and even botany and zoölogy so far as they relate to paleontology. But he does not insist that the relative importance of physical or chemical factors shall be determined before he applies the methods and data of these sciences to his problem. Indeed, he has learned that a geological area is too complex a thing to be reduced to a single explanation. He has abandoned the single hypothesis for the multiple hypothesis. He creates a whole family of possible explanations of a given problem and thus avoids the warping influence of partiality for a simple theory.

Have we not here an illustration of what is possible and necessary for the historian? Is it not well, before attempting to decide whether history requires an economic interpretation, or a psychological, or any other ultimate interpretation, to recognize that the factors in human society are varied and complex; that the political historian handling his subject in isolation is certain to miss fundamental facts and relations in his treatment of a given age or nation; that the economic historian is exposed to the same danger; and so of all of the other special historians?

Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a place on the historian's page.

The economic historian is in danger of making his analysis and his statement of a law on the basis of present conditions and then passing to history for justificatory appendixes to his conclusions. An American economist of high rank has recently expressed his conception of "the full relation of economic theory, statistics, and history" in these words:

A principle is formulated by a priori reasoning concerning facts of common experience; it is then tested by statistics and promoted to the rank of a known and acknowledged truth; illustrations of its action are then found in narrative history and, on the other hand, the economic law becomes the interpreter of records that would otherwise be confusing and comparatively valueless; the law itself derives its final confirmation from the illustrations of its working which the records afford; but what is at least of equal importance is the parallel fact that the law affords the decisive test of the correctness of those assertions concerning the causes and the effects of past events which it is second nature to make and which historians almost invariably do make in connection with their narrations.[333:1]

There is much in this statement by which the historian may profit, but he may doubt also whether the past should serve merely as the "illustration" by which to confirm the law deduced from common experience by a priori reasoning tested by statistics. In fact the pathway of history is strewn with the wrecks of the "known and acknowledged truths" of economic law, due not only to defective analysis and imperfect statistics, but also to the lack of critical historical methods, of insufficient historical-mindedness on the part of the economist, to failure to give due attention to the relativity and transiency of the conditions from which his laws were deduced.

But the point on which I would lay stress is this. The economist, the political scientist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the geographer, the student of literature, of art, of religion--all the allied laborers in the study of society--have contributions to make to the equipment of the historian. These contributions are partly of material, partly of tools, partly of new points of view, new hypotheses, new suggestions of relations, causes, and emphasis. Each of these special students is in some danger of bias by his particular point of view, by his exposure to see simply the thing in which he is primarily interested, and also by his effort to deduce the universal laws of his separate science. The historian, on the other hand, is exposed to the danger of dealing with the complex and interacting social forces of a period or of a country, from some single point of view to which his special training or interest inclines him. If the truth is to be made known, the historian must so far familiarize himself with the work, and equip himself with the training of his sister-subjects that he can at least avail himself of their results and in some reasonable degree master the essential tools of their trade. And the followers of the sister-studies must likewise familiarize themselves and their students with the work and the methods of the historians, and coöperate in the difficult task.

It is necessary that the American historian shall aim at this equipment, not so much that he may possess the key to history or satisfy himself in regard to its ultimate laws. At present a different duty is before him. He must see in American society with its vast spaces, its sections equal to European nations, its geographic influences, its brief period of development, its variety of nationalities and races, its extraordinary industrial growth under the conditions of freedom, its institutions, culture, ideals, social psychology, and even its religions forming and changing almost under his eyes, one of the richest fields ever offered for the preliminary recognition and study of the forces that operate and interplay in the making of society.

FOOTNOTES:

[311:1] Annual address as the president of the American Historical Association, delivered at Indianapolis, December 28, 1910. Reprinted by permission from The American Historical Review, January, 1911.

[313:1] Van Hise, "Conservation of Natural Resources," pp. 23, 24.

[316:1] Atlantic Monthly, December, 1908, vii, p. 745.

[317:1] [Although the words of these early land debates are quoted above in Chapter VI, they are repeated because of the light they cast upon the present problem.]

[321:1] [I have outlined this subject in various essays, including the article on "Sectionalism" in McLaughlin and Hart, "Cyclopedia of Government."]

[322:1] [It is not impossible that they may ultimately replace the State as the significant administrative and legislative units. There are strong evidences of this tendency, such as the organization of the Federal Reserve districts, and proposals for railroad administration by regions.]

[329:1] [See R. G. Wellington, "Public Lands, 1820-1840"; G. M. Stephenson, "Public Lands, 1841-1862"; J. Ise, "Forest Policy."]

[333:1] Professor J. B. Clark, in Commons, ed., "Documentary History of American Industrial Society," I. 43-44.


XIII

MIDDLE WESTERN PIONEER DEMOCRACY[335:1]

In time of war, when all that this nation has stood for, all the things in which it passionately believes, are at stake, we have met to dedicate this beautiful home for history.

There is a fitness in the occasion. It is for historic ideals that we are fighting. If this nation is one for which we should pour out our savings, postpone our differences, go hungry, and even give up life itself, it is not because it is a rich, extensive, well-fed and populous nation; it is because from its early days America has pressed onward toward a goal of its own; that it has followed an ideal, the ideal of a democracy developing under conditions unlike those of any other age or country.

We are fighting not for an Old World ideal, not for an abstraction, not for a philosophical revolution. Broad and generous as are our sympathies, widely scattered in origin as are our people, keenly as we feel the call of kinship, the thrill of sympathy with the stricken nations across the Atlantic, we are fighting for the historic ideals of the United States, for the continued existence of the type of society in which we believe, because we have proved it good, for the things which drew European exiles to our shores, and which inspired the hopes of the pioneers.

We are at war that the history of the United States, rich with the record of high human purposes, and of faith in the destiny of the common man under freedom, filled with the promises of a better world, may not become the lost and tragic story of a futile dream.

Yes, it is an American ideal and an American example for which we fight; but in that ideal and example lies medicine for the healing of the nations. It is the best we have to give to Europe, and it is a matter of vital import that we shall safeguard and preserve our power to serve the world, and not be overwhelmed in the flood of imperialistic force that wills the death of democracy and would send the freeman under the yoke. Essential as are our contributions of wealth, the work of our scientists, the toil of our farmers and our workmen in factory and shipyard, priceless as is the stream of young American manhood which we pour forth to stop the flood which flows like moulten lava across the green fields and peaceful hamlets of Europe toward the sea and turns to ashes and death all that it covers, these contributions have their deeper meaning in the American spirit. They are born of the love of Democracy.

Long ago in prophetic words Walt Whitman voiced the meaning of our present sacrifices:

"Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy, Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the Present only, The Past is also stored in thee, Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western Continent alone, Earth's résumé entire floats on thy keel, O ship, is steadied by thy spars, With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or swim with thee, With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars, thou bear'st the other continents, Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant."

Shortly before the Civil War, a great German, exiled from his native land for his love of freedom, came from his new home among the pioneers of the Middle West to set forth in Faneuil Hall, the "cradle of liberty," in Boston, his vision of the young America that was forming in the West, "the last depository of the hopes of all true friends of humanity." Speaking of the contrast between the migrations to the Mississippi Valley and those of the Old World in other centuries, he said:

It is now not a barbarous multitude pouncing upon old and decrepit empires, not a violent concussion of tribes accompanied by all the horrors of general destruction, but we see the vigorous elements--peaceably congregating and mingling together on virgin soil--; led together by the irresistible attraction of free and broad principles; undertaking to commence a new era in the history of the world, without first destroying the results of the progress of past periods; undertaking to found a cosmopolitan nation without marching over the dead bodies of slain millions.

If Carl Schurz had lived to see the outcome of that Germany from which he was sent as an exile, in the days when Prussian bayonets dispersed the legislatures and stamped out the beginnings of democratic rule in his former country, could he have better pictured the contrasts between the Prussian and the American spirit? He went on to say:

Thus was founded the great colony of free humanity, which has not old England alone, but the world for its mother country. And in the colony of free humanity, whose mother country is the world, they established the Republic of equal rights where the title of manhood is the title to citizenship. My friends, if I had a thousand tongues, and a voice as strong as the thunder of heaven, they would not be sufficient to impress upon your minds forcibly enough the greatness of this idea, the overshadowing glory of this result. This was the dream of the truest friends of man from the beginning; for this the noblest blood of martyrs has been shed; for this has mankind waded through seas of blood and tears. There it is now; there it stands, the noble fabric in all the splendor of reality.

It is in a solemn and inspiring time, therefore, that we meet to dedicate this building, and the occasion is fitting to the time. We may now see, as never before, the deeper significance, the larger meaning of these pioneers, whose plain lives and homely annals are glorified as a part of the story of the building of a better system of social justice under freedom, a broader, and as we fervently hope, a more enduring foundation for the welfare and progress under individual liberty of the common man, an example of federation, of peaceful adjustments by compromise and concession under a self-governing Republic, where sections replace nations over a Union as large as Europe, where party discussions take the place of warring countries, where the Pax Americana furnishes an example for a better world.

As our forefathers, the pioneers, gathered in their neighborhood to raise the log cabin, and sanctified it by the name of home, the dwelling place of pioneer ideals, so we meet to celebrate the raising of this home, this shrine of Minnesota's historic life. It symbolizes the conviction that the past and the future of this people are tied together; that this Historical Society is the keeper of the records of a noteworthy movement in the progress of mankind; that these records are not unmeaning and antiquarian, but even in their details are worthy of preservation for their revelation of the beginnings of society in the midst of a nation caught by the vision of a better future for the world.

Let me repeat the words of Harriet Martineau, who portrayed the American of the thirties:

I regard the American people as a great embryo poet, now moody, now wild, but bringing out results of absolute good sense; restless and wayward in action, but with deep peace at his heart; exulting that he has caught the true aspect of things past and the depth of futurity which lies before him, wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has scarcely begun to dream of. There is the strongest hope of a nation that is capable of being possessed with an idea.

And recall her appeal to the American people to "cherish their high democratic hope, their faith in man. The older they grow the more they must reverence the dreams of their youth."

The dreams of their youth! Here they shall be preserved, and the achievements as well as the aspirations of the men who made the State, the men who built on their foundations, the men with large vision and power of action, the lesser men in the mass, the leaders who served the State and nation with devotion to the cause. Here shall be preserved the record of the men who failed to see the larger vision and worked impatiently with narrow or selfish or class ends, as well as of those who labored with patience and sympathy and mutual concession, with readiness to make adjustments and to subordinate their immediate interests to the larger good and the immediate safety of the nation.

In the archives of such an old institution as that of the Historical Society of Massachusetts, whose treasures run to the beginnings of the Puritan colonization, the students cannot fail to find the evidence that a State Historical Society is a Book of Judgment wherein is made up the record of a people and its leaders. So, as time unfolds, shall be the collections of this Society, the depository of the material that shall preserve the memory of this people. Each section of this widely extended and varied nation has its own peculiar past, its special form of society, its traits and its leaders. It were a pity if any section left its annals solely to the collectors of a remote region, and it were a pity if its collections were not transformed into printed documents and monographic studies which can go to the libraries of all the parts of the Union and thus enable the student to see the nation as a whole in its past as well as in its present.

This Society finds its special field of activity in a great State of the Middle West, so new, as history reckons time, that its annals are still predominantly those of the pioneers, but so rapidly growing that already the era of the pioneers is a part of the history of the past, capable of being handled objectively, seen in a perspective that is not possible to the observer of the present conditions.

Because of these facts I have taken as the special theme of this address the Middle Western Pioneer Democracy, which I would sketch in some of its outstanding aspects, and chiefly in the generation before the Civil War, for it was from those pioneers that the later colonization to the newer parts of the Mississippi Valley derived much of their traits, and from whom large numbers of them came.

The North Central States as a whole is a region comparable to all of Central Europe. Of these States, a large part of the old Northwest,--Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin; and their sisters beyond the Mississippi--Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota--were still, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the home of an essentially pioneer society. Within the lifetime of many living men, Wisconsin was called the "Far West," and Minnesota was a land of the Indian and the fur traders, a wilderness of forest and prairie beyond the "edge of cultivation." That portion of this great region which was still in the pioneering period of settlement by 1850 was alone about as extensive as the old thirteen States, or Germany and Austria-Hungary combined. The region was a huge geographic mold for a new society, modeled by nature on the scale of the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, the upper Mississippi and the Missouri. Simple and majestic in its vast outlines it was graven into a variety that in its detail also had a largeness of design. From the Great Lakes extended the massive glacial sheet which covered that mighty basin and laid down treasures of soil. Vast forests of pine shrouded its upper zone, breaking into hardwood and the oak openings as they neared the ocean-like expanses of the prairies. Forests again along the Ohio Valley, and beyond, to the west, lay the levels of the Great Plains. Within the earth were unexploited treasures of coal and lead, copper and iron in such form and quantity as were to revolutionize the industrial processes of the world. But nature's revelations are progressive, and it was rather the marvelous adaptation of the soil to the raising of corn and wheat that drew the pioneers to this land of promise, and made a new era of colonization. In the unity with variety of this pioneer empire and in its broad levels we have a promise of its society.

First had come the children of the interior of the South, and with ax and rifle in hand had cut their clearings in the forest, raised their log cabins, fought the Indians and by 1830 had pushed their way to the very edge of the prairies along the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, leaving unoccupied most of the Basin of the Great Lakes.

These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and live stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had at first small interest in town life or a share in markets. They were passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which assumed that under free conditions in the midst of unlimited resources, the homogeneous society of the pioneers must result in equality. What they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own career without fear or favor. What they instinctively opposed was the crystallization of differences, the monopolization of opportunity and the fixing of that monopoly by government or by social customs. The road must be open. The game must be played according to the rules. There must be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity, no closed doors to the able, no stopping the free game before it was played to the end. More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real feeling, that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able to achieve preëminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter of pride and to the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the less successful.

If this democracy of Southern pioneers, this Jacksonian democracy, was, as its socialist critics have called it, in reality a democracy of "expectant capitalists," it was not one which expected or acknowledged on the part of the successful ones the right to harden their triumphs into the rule of a privileged class. In short, if it is indeed true that the backwoods democracy was based upon equality of opportunity, it is also true that it resented the conception that opportunity under competition should result in the hopeless inequality, or rule of class. Ever a new clearing must be possible. And because the wilderness seemed so unending, the menace to the enjoyment of this ideal seemed rather to be feared from government, within or without, than from the operations of internal evolution.

From the first, it became evident that these men had means of supplementing their individual activity by informal combinations. One of the things that impressed all early travelers in the United States was the capacity for extra-legal, voluntary association.[343:1] This was natural enough; in all America we can study the process by which in a new land social customs form and crystallize into law. We can even see how the personal leader becomes the governmental official. This power of the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common end without the intervention of governmental institutions was one of their marked characteristics. The log rolling, the house-raising, the husking bee, the apple paring, and the squatters' associations whereby they protected themselves against the speculators in securing title to their clearings on the public domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp, the vigilantes, the cattle-raisers' associations, the "gentlemen's agreements," are a few of the indications of this attitude. It is well to emphasize this American trait, because in a modified way it has come to be one of the most characteristic and important features of the United States of to-day. America does through informal association and understandings on the part of the people many of the things which in the Old World are and can be done only by governmental intervention and compulsion. These associations were in America not due to immemorial custom of tribe or village community. They were extemporized by voluntary action.

The actions of these associations had an authority akin to that of law. They were usually not so much evidences of a disrespect for law and order as the only means by which real law and order were possible in a region where settlement and society had gone in advance of the institutions and instrumentalities of organized society.

Because of these elements of individualistic competition and the power of spontaneous association, pioneers were responsive to leadership. The backwoodsmen knew that under the free opportunities of his life the abler man would reveal himself, and show them the way. By free choice and not by compulsion, by spontaneous impulse, and not by the domination of a caste, they rallied around a cause, they supported an issue. They yielded to the principle of government by agreement, and they hated the doctrine of autocracy even before it gained a name.

They looked forward to the extension of their American principles to the Old World and their keenest apprehensions came from the possibility of the extension of the Old World's system of arbitrary rule, its class wars and rivalries and interventions to the destruction of the free States and democratic institutions which they were building in the forests of America.

If we add to these aspects of early backwoods democracy, its spiritual qualities, we shall more easily understand them. These men were emotional. As they wrested their clearing from the woods and from the savages who surrounded them, as they expanded that clearing and saw the beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy. They had faith in themselves and their destiny. And that optimistic faith was responsible both for their confidence in their own ability to rule and for the passion for expansion. They looked to the future. "Others appeal to history: an American appeals to prophecy; and with Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country in the other, he boldly defies us to a comparison with America as she is to be," said a London periodical in 1821. Just because, perhaps, of the usual isolation of their lives, when they came together in associations whether of the camp meeting or of the political gathering, they felt the influence of a common emotion and enthusiasm. Whether Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, Baptist, or Methodist, these people saturated their religion and their politics with feeling. Both the stump and the pulpit were centers of energy, electric cells capable of starting widespreading fires. They felt both their religion and their democracy, and were ready to fight for it.

This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social comradeship among its widespread members. Justice Catron, who came from Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presidency of Jackson, said: "The people of New Orleans and St. Louis are next neighbors--if we desire to know a man in any quarter of the union we inquire of our next neighbor, who but the other day lived by him." Exaggerated as this is, it nevertheless had a surprising measure of truth for the Middle West as well. For the Mississippi River was the great highway down which groups of pioneers like Abraham Lincoln, on their rafts and flat boats, brought the little neighborhood surplus. After the steamboat came to the western waters the voyages up and down by merchants and by farmers shifting their homes, brought people into contact with each other over wide areas.

This enlarged neighborhood democracy was determined not by a reluctant admission that under the law one man is as good as another; it was based upon "good fellowship," sympathy and understanding. They were of a stock, moreover, which sought new trails and were ready to follow where the trail led, innovators in society as well as finders of new lands.

By 1830 the Southern inundation ebbed and a different tide flowed in from the northeast by way of the Erie Canal and steam navigation on the Great Lakes to occupy the zone unreached by Southern settlement. This new tide spread along the margins of the Great Lakes, found the oak openings and small prairie islands of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin; followed the fertile forested ribbons along the river courses far into the prairie lands; and by the end of the forties began to venture into the margin of the open prairie.

In 1830 the Middle West contained a little over a million and a half people; in 1840, over three and a third millions; in 1850, nearly five and a half millions. Although in 1830 the North Atlantic States numbered between three and four times as many people as the Middle West, yet in those two decades the Middle West made an actual gain of several hundred thousand more than did the old section. Counties in the newer states rose from a few hundred to ten or fifteen thousand people in the space of less than five years. Suddenly, with astonishing rapidity and volume, a new people was forming with varied elements, ideals and institutions drawn from all over this nation and from Europe. They were confronted with the problem of adjusting different stocks, varied customs and habits, to their new home.

In comparison with the Ohio Valley, the peculiarity of the occupation of the northern zone of the Middle West, lay in the fact that the native element was predominantly from the older settlements of the Middle West itself and from New York and New England. But it was from the central and western counties of New York and from the western and northern parts of New England, the rural regions of declining agricultural prosperity, that the bulk of this element came.

Thus the influence of the Middle West stretched into the Northeast, and attracted a farming population already suffering from western competition. The advantage of abundant, fertile, and cheap land, the richer agricultural returns, and especially the opportunities for youth to rise in all the trades and professions, gave strength to this competition. By it New England was profoundly and permanently modified.

This Yankee stock carried with it a habit of community life, in contrast with the individualistic democracy of the Southern element. The colonizing land companies, the town, the school, the church, the feeling of local unity, furnished the evidences of this instinct for communities. This instinct was accompanied by the creation of cities, the production of a surplus for market, the reaching out to connections with the trading centers of the East, the evolution of a more complex and at the same time a more integrated industrial society than that of the Southern pioneer.

But they did not carry with them the unmodified New England institutions and traits. They came at a time and from a people less satisfied with the old order than were their neighbors in the East. They were the young men with initiative, with discontent; the New York element especially was affected by the radicalism of Locofoco democracy which was in itself a protest against the established order.

The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a mass of old habits and prepossessions. Said one of these pioneers in a letter to friends in the East:

If you value ease more than money or prosperity, don't come. . . . Hands are too few for the work, houses for the inhabitants, and days for the day's work to be done. . . . Next if you can't stand seeing your old New England ideas, ways of doing, and living and in fact, all of the good old Yankee fashions knocked out of shape and altered, or thrown by as unsuited to the climate, don't be caught out here. But if you can bear grief with a smile, can put up with a scale of accommodations ranging from the soft side of a plank before the fire (and perhaps three in a bed at that) down through the middling and inferior grades; if you are never at a loss for ways to do the most unpracticable things without tools; if you can do all this and some more come on. . . . It is a universal rule here to help one another, each one keeping an eye single to his own business.

They knew that they were leaving many dear associations of the old home, giving up many of the comforts of life, sacrificing things which those who remained thought too vital to civilization to be left. But they were not mere materialists ready to surrender all that life is worth for immediate gain. They were idealists themselves, sacrificing the ease of the immediate future for the welfare of their children, and convinced of the possibility of helping to bring about a better social order and a freer life. They were social idealists. But they based their ideals on trust in the common man and the readiness to make adjustments, not on the rule of a benevolent despot or a controlling class.

The attraction of this new home reached also into the Old World and gave a new hope and new impulses to the people of Germany, of England, of Ireland, and of Scandinavia. Both economic influences and revolutionary discontent promoted German migration at this time; economic causes brought the larger volume, but the quest for liberty brought the leaders, many of whom were German political exiles. While the latter urged, with varying degrees of emphasis, that their own contribution should be preserved in their new surroundings, and a few visionaries even talked of a German State in the federal system, what was noteworthy was the adjustment of the emigrants of the thirties and forties to Middle Western conditions; the response to the opportunity to create a new type of society in which all gave and all received and no element remained isolated. Society was plastic. In the midst of more or less antagonism between "bowie knife Southerners," "cow-milking Yankee Puritans," "beer-drinking Germans," "wild Irishmen," a process of mutual education, a giving and taking, was at work. In the outcome, in spite of slowness of assimilation where different groups were compact and isolated from the others, and a certain persistence of inherited morale, there was the creation of a new type, which was neither the sum of all its elements, nor a complete fusion in a melting pot. They were American pioneers, not outlying fragments of New England, of Germany, or of Norway.

The Germans were most strongly represented in the Missouri Valley, in St. Louis, in Illinois opposite that city, and in the Lake Shore counties of eastern Wisconsin north from Milwaukee. In Cincinnati and Cleveland there were many Germans, while in nearly half the counties of Ohio, the German immigrants and the Pennsylvania Germans held nearly or quite the balance of political power. The Irish came primarily as workers on turnpikes, canals and railroads, and tended to remain along such lines, or to gather in the growing cities. The Scandinavians, of whom the largest proportion were Norwegians, founded their colonies in Northern Illinois, and in Southern Wisconsin about the Fox and the head waters of Rock River, whence in later years they spread into Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota.

By 1850 about one-sixth of the people of the Middle West were of North Atlantic birth, about one-eighth of Southern birth, and a like fraction of foreign birth, of whom the Germans were twice as numerous as the Irish, and the Scandinavians only slightly more numerous than the Welsh, and fewer than the Scotch. There were only a dozen Scandinavians in Minnesota. The natives of the British Islands, together with the natives of British North America in the Middle West, numbered nearly as many as the natives of German lands. But in 1850 almost three-fifths of the population were natives of the Middle West itself, and over a third of the population lived in Ohio. The cities were especially a mixture of peoples. In the five larger cities of the section natives and foreigners were nearly balanced. In Chicago the Irish, Germans and natives of the North Atlantic States about equaled each other. But in all the other cities, the Germans exceeded the Irish in varying proportions. There were nearly three to one in Milwaukee.

It is not merely that the section was growing rapidly and was made up of various stocks with many different cultures, sectional and European; what is more significant is that these elements did not remain as separate strata underneath an established ruling order, as was the case particularly in New England. All were accepted and intermingling components of a forming society, plastic and absorptive. This characteristic of the section as "a good mixer" became fixed before the large immigrations of the eighties. The foundations of the section were laid firmly in a period when the foreign elements were particularly free and eager to contribute to a new society and to receive an impress from the country which offered them a liberty denied abroad. Significant as is this fact, and influential in the solution of America's present problems, it is no more important than the fact that in the decade before the Civil War, the Southern element in the Middle West had also had nearly two generations of direct association with the Northern, and had finally been engulfed in a tide of Northeastern and Old World settlers.

In this society of pioneers men learned to drop their old national animosities. One of the Immigrant Guides of the fifties urged the newcomers to abandon their racial animosities. "The American laughs at these steerage quarrels," said the author.

Thus the Middle West was teaching the lesson of national cross-fertilization instead of national enmities, the possibility of a newer and richer civilization, not by preserving unmodified or isolated the old component elements, but by breaking down the line-fences, by merging the individual life in the common product--a new product, which held the promise of world brotherhood. If the pioneers divided their allegiance between various parties, Whig, Democrat, Free Soil or Republican, it does not follow that the western Whig was like the eastern Whig. There was an infiltration of a western quality into all of these. The western Whig supported Harrison more because he was a pioneer than because he was a Whig. It saw in him a legitimate successor of Andrew Jackson. The campaign of 1840 was a Middle Western camp meeting on a huge scale. The log cabins, the cider and the coonskins were the symbols of the triumph of Middle Western ideas, and were carried with misgivings by the merchants, the bankers and the manufacturers of the East. In like fashion, the Middle Western wing of the Democratic party was as different from the Southern wing wherein lay its strength, as Douglas was from Calhoun. It had little in common with the slaveholding classes of the South, even while it felt the kinship of the pioneer with the people of the Southern upland stock from which so many Westerners were descended.

In the later forties and early fifties most of the Middle Western States made constitutions. The debates in their conventions and the results embodied in the constitutions themselves tell the story of their political ideals. Of course, they based the franchise on the principle of manhood suffrage. But they also provided for an elective judiciary, for restrictions on the borrowing power of the State, lest it fall under the control of what they feared as the money power, and several of them either provided for the extinguishment of banks of issue, or rigidly restrained them. Some of them exempted the homestead from forced sale for debt; married women's legal rights were prominent topics in the debates of the conventions, and Wisconsin led off by permitting the alien to vote after a year's residence. It welcomed the newcomer to the freedom and to the obligations of American citizenship.

Although this pioneer society was preponderantly an agricultural society it was rapidly learning that agriculture alone was not sufficient for its life. It was developing manufactures, trade, mining, the professions, and becoming conscious that in a progressive modern state it was possible to pass from one industry to another and that all were bound by common ties. But it is significant that in the census of 1850, Ohio, out of a population of two millions, reported only a thousand servants, Iowa only ten in two hundred thousand and Minnesota fifteen in its six thousand.

In the intellectual life of this new democracy there was already the promise of original contributions even in the midst of the engrossing toil and hard life of the pioneer.

The country editor was a leader of his people, not a patent-insides recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and writer. The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers as the New York Tribune had an extensive circulation throughout the Middle West. The agricultural press presupposed in its articles and contributions a level of general intelligence and interest above that of the later farmers of the section, at least before the present day.

Farmer boys walked behind the plow with their book in hand and sometimes forgot to turn at the end of the furrow; even rare boys, who, like the young Howells, "limped barefoot by his father's side with his eyes on the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare."

Periodicals flourished and faded like the prairie flowers. Some of Emerson's best poems first appeared in one of these Ohio Valley magazines. But for the most part the literature of the region and the period was imitative or reflective of the common things in a not uncommon way. It is to its children that the Middle West had to look for the expression of its life and its ideals rather than to the busy pioneer who was breaking a prairie farm or building up a new community. Illiteracy was least among the Yankee pioneers and highest among the Southern element. When illiteracy is mapped for 1850 by percentages there appears two distinct zones, the one extending from New England, the other from the South.

The influence of New England men was strong in the Yankee regions of the Middle West. Home missionaries, and representatives of societies for the promotion of education in the West, both in the common school and denominational colleges, scattered themselves throughout the region and left a deep impress in all these States. The conception was firmly fixed in the thirties and forties that the West was the coming power in the Union, that the fate of civilization was in its hands, and therefore rival sects and rival sections strove to influence it to their own types. But the Middle West shaped all these educational contributions according to her own needs and ideals.

The State Universities were for the most part the result of agitation and proposals of men of New England origin; but they became characteristic products of Middle Western society, where the community as a whole, rather than wealthy benefactors, supported these institutions. In the end the community determined their directions in accord with popular ideals. They reached down more deeply into the ranks of the common people than did the New England or Middle State Colleges; they laid more emphasis upon the obviously useful, and became coëducational at an early date. This dominance of the community ideals had dangers for the Universities, which were called to raise ideals and to point new ways, rather than to conform.

Challenging the spaces of the West, struck by the rapidity with which a new society was unfolding under their gaze, it is not strange that the pioneers dealt in the superlative and saw their destiny with optimistic eyes. The meadow lot of the small intervale had become the prairie, stretching farther than their gaze could reach.

All was motion and change. A restlessness was universal. Men moved, in their single life, from Vermont to New York, from New York to Ohio, from Ohio to Wisconsin, from Wisconsin to California, and longed for the Hawaiian Islands. When the bark started from their fence rails, they felt the call to change. They were conscious of the mobility of their society and gloried in it. They broke with the Past and thought to create something finer, more fitting for humanity, more beneficial for the average man than the world had ever seen.

"With the Past we have literally nothing to do," said B. Gratz Brown in a Missouri Fourth of July oration in 1850, "save to dream of it. Its lessons are lost and its tongue is silent. We are ourselves at the head and front of all political experience. Precedents have lost their virtue and all their authority is gone. . . . Experience can profit us only to guard from antequated delusions."

"The yoke of opinion," wrote Channing to a Western friend, speaking of New England, "is a heavy one, often crushing individuality of judgment and action," and he added that the habits, rules, and criticisms under which he had grown up had not left him the freedom and courage which are needed in the style of address best suited to the Western people. Channing no doubt unduly stressed the freedom of the West in this respect. The frontier had its own conventions and prejudices, and New England was breaking its own cake of custom and proclaiming a new liberty at the very time he wrote. But there was truth in the Eastern thought of the West, as a land of intellectual toleration, one which questioned the old order of things and made innovation its very creed.

The West laid emphasis upon the practical and demanded that ideals should be put to work for useful ends; ideals were tested by their direct contributions to the betterment of the average man, rather than by the production of the man of exceptional genius and distinction.

For, in fine this was the goal of the Middle West, the welfare of the average man; not only the man of the South, or of the East, the Yankee, or the Irishman, or the German, but all men in one common fellowship. This was the hope of their youth, of that youth when Abraham Lincoln rose from rail-splitter to country lawyer, from Illinois legislator to congressman and from congressman to President.

It is not strange that in all this flux and freedom and novelty and vast spaces, the pioneer did not sufficiently consider the need of disciplined devotion to the government which he himself created and operated. But the name of Lincoln and the response of the pioneer to the duties of the Civil War,--to the sacrifices and the restraints on freedom which it entailed under his presidency, reminds us that they knew how to take part in a common cause, even while they knew that war's conditions were destructive of many of the things for which they worked.

There are two kinds of governmental discipline: that which proceeds from free choice, in the conviction that restraint of individual or class interests is necessary for the common good; and that which is imposed by a dominant class, upon a subjected and helpless people. The latter is Prussian discipline, the discipline of a harsh machine-like, logical organization, based on the rule of a military autocracy. It assumes that if you do not crush your opponent first, he will crush you. It is the discipline of a nation ruled by its General Staff, assuming war as the normal condition of peoples, and attempting with remorseless logic to extend its operations to the destruction of freedom everywhere. It can only be met by the discipline of a people who use their own government for worthy ends, who preserve individuality and mobility in society and respect the rights of others, who follow the dictates of humanity and fair play, the principles of give and take. The Prussian discipline is the discipline of Thor, the War God, against the discipline of the White Christ.

Pioneer democracy has had to learn lessons by experience: the lesson that government on principles of free democracy can accomplish many things which the men of the middle of the nineteenth century did not realize were even possible. They have had to sacrifice something of their passion for individual unrestraint; they have had to learn that the specially trained man, the man fitted for his calling by education and experience, whether in the field of science or of industry, has a place in government; that the rule of the people is effective and enduring only as it incorporates the trained specialist into the organization of that government, whether as umpire between contending interests or as the efficient instrument in the hands of democracy.

Organized democracy after the era of free land has learned that popular government to be successful must not only be legitimately the choice of the whole people; that the offices of that government must not only be open to all, but that in the fierce struggle of nations in the field of economic competition and in the field of war, the salvation and perpetuity of the republic depend upon recognition of the fact that specialization of the organs of the government, the choice of the fit and the capable for office, is quite as important as the extension of popular control. When we lost our free lands and our isolation from the Old World, we lost our immunity from the results of mistakes, of waste, of inefficiency, and of inexperience in our government.

But in the present day we are also learning another lesson which was better known to the pioneers than to their immediate successors. We are learning that the distinction arising from devotion to the interests of the commonwealth is a higher distinction than mere success in economic competition. America is now awarding laurels to the men who sacrifice their triumphs in the rivalry of business in order to give their service to the cause of a liberty-loving nation, their wealth and their genius to the success of her ideals. That craving for distinction which once drew men to pile up wealth and exhibit power over the industrial processes of the nation, is now finding a new outlet in the craving for distinction that comes from service to the Union, in satisfaction in the use of great talent for the good of the republic.

And all over the nation, in voluntary organizations for aid to the government, is being shown the pioneer principle of association that was expressed in the "house raising." It is shown in the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Knights of Columbus, the councils and boards of science, commerce, labor, agriculture; and in all the countless other types, from the association of women in their kitchen who carry out the recommendations of the Food Director and revive the plain living of the pioneer, to the Boy Scouts who are laying the foundations for a self-disciplined and virile generation worthy to follow the trail of the backwoodsmen. It is an inspiring prophecy of the revival of the old pioneer conception of the obligations and opportunities of neighborliness, broadening to a national and even to an international scope. The promise of what that wise and lamented philosopher, Josiah Royce called, "the beloved community." In the spirit of the pioneer's "house raising" lies the salvation of the Republic.

This then is the heritage of pioneer experience,--a passionate belief that a democracy was possible which should leave the individual a part to play in free society and not make him a cog in a machine operated from above; which trusted in the common man, in his tolerance, his ability to adjust differences with good humor, and to work out an American type from the contributions of all nations--a type for which he would fight against those who challenged it in arms, and for which in time of war he would make sacrifices, even the temporary sacrifice of individual freedom and his life, lest that freedom be lost forever.

FOOTNOTES:

[335:1] An address delivered at the dedication of the building of the State Historical Society of Minnesota, May 11, 1918. Printed by permission of the Society.

[343:1] See De Tocqueville's interesting appreciation of this American phenomenon.


INDEX

Absentee proprietors, 55, 297

Achievement, 309

Adams, Henry, 213

Adams, J. Q., 26, 192, 230

Agriculture, 314, 329; Middle West, 149, 150

Agriculture, Department of, 320

Alamance, 119, 120

Alaska, 296

Albany, 43, 52

Albany congress of 1754, 15

Algonquin Indians, 130

Aliens, land tenure by, 110

Alleghany Mountains, 9, 18, 67; as barrier to be overcome, 195

Allen, Ethan, 54

Allen, W. V., 220

American Historical Assoc., 159

American history, social forces, 311; survey of recent, 311

American life, distinguishing feature, 2

American people, 339

American spirit, 306, 336, 337

"American System," 171, 172

Americanization, effective, 4

Arid lands, 9, 147, 219, 239, 245, 278

Aristocracy, 250, 254, 257, 275

Army posts, frontier, 16; prototypes, 47

Asia, 296

Association, voluntary, 343, 344, 358

Astor's American Fur Co., 6, 143

Atlantic coast, as early frontier, 4; Mississippi Valley and, 190, 191; Northern, History, 295

Atlantic frontier, composition, 12

Atlantic states, 207, 208

Augusta, Ga., 98

Autocracy, 344

Back country, 68, 70; democracy of, 248; New England, 75

Backwoods society, 212

Backwoodsmen, 163, 164

Bacon, Francis, 286

Bacon's Rebellion, 84, 247, 251, 301

Baltimore, trade, 108

Bancroft, George, 168

Bank, 171, 254, 325

Bedford, Pa., 5

Beecher, Lyman, 35

Bell, John, 192

Benton, T. H., 26, 35, 192, 325, 328

Berkshires, 60, 71, 77

Beverley, Robert, 85, 91; manor, 92

"Birch seal," 78

Black Hills, 145

Blackmar, F. W., 238

Blank patents, 95

Blood-feud, 253

Blount, William, 187

Blue Ridge, 90, 99

Boone, A. J., 19

Boone, Daniel, 18, 105, 124, 165, 206

Boston, trade, 108

Boutmy, E. G., 211

Braddock, Edward, 181, 324

Brattle, Thomas, 56

British and Middle West, 350

Brown, B. Gratz, 355

Brunswick County, Va., 91

Bryan, W. J., 204, 236, 237, 246, 281, 327, 329

Bryce, James, 165, 206, 211, 284

Buffalo, N. Y., 136, 150, 151

Buffalo herds, 144

Buffer state, 131, 134

Burke, Edmund, 33; on the Germans, 109

Byrd, Col. William, 84, 87, 98

Calhoun, J. C., 2, 105, 141, 174, 206, 241; on representation, 117; policy of obtaining western trade for the South, 196

California, 8; gold, 144

Canada, 53, 226; barrier between, and the United States, 131; border warfare, 44; homesteads, 296; Middle West and, 128; wheat fields, 278

Canadians, 227

Canals, deep water, 150

Capital, 276, 305, 325; concentration and combinations, 245, 261, 266, 280, 305-306

"Capitalistic classes," 285

Capitalists, 20; "expectant," 343

Capitals, state, transfers, 121

Captains of industry, 258, 259, 260

Carnegie, Andrew, 260, 265

Caroline cow-pens, 16

Catron, John, 345

Cattle raising in Virginia, 88, 89, 92

Census, first, frontier at, 5

Census of 1820, frontier, 6

Census of 1890, extinction of frontier, 1, 9, 38, 39, 297

Center of nation, 222

Channing, W. E., 355

Charleston, S. C., 88, 108, 196

Chase, S. P., 104, 142

Cherry Valley, 104

Chicago, 137, 150, 151, 180, 350; character, 232

Chillicothe, 133, 223

Cincinnati, 133, 151, 162, 223, 231, 232

Cincinnati and Charleston R. R., 174

Cities, 297, 316-317; northeastern, 294-295; seaboard, 194, 195, 196; three periods of development, 195

Civil War, 356; Middle West and, 142; Mississippi Valley and, 201; Northwest and, 217

Clark, G. R., 131, 167, 186

Clark, J. B., 332

Class distinctions, 280, 285

Clay, Henry, 26, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 192, 197, 206, 213, 216, 226, 241, 304, 325

Cleaveland, Gen. Moses, 133, 222, 257

Cleveland, 133, 150, 223, 231, 232

Clinton, De Witt, 195, 196

Coal supply, 313

Coast, Atlantic, 206; destiny, 295; interior and, antagonisms, 110

Coeducation, 353

Colden, Cadwallader, 80

Colonial life, 11

Colonial system, 127

Colonization, 312; English and French contrasted, 13-14; peaceful, 169

Colony of free humanity, 337-338

Columbus, Ohio, 162, 229

Combinations of capital and of labor, 245

Commencement seasons, 290

Commons, J. R., 327

Community, "beloved community," 358; life, 347; type of settlement, 73, 74, 125

Competition, 154, 203, 277, 308, 312

Compromise, 174, 198, 230, 236; slavery, 140, 142

Concentration of power and wealth, 245, 261, 266, 280

Concord, Mass., 39

Concurrent majority, 118

Congregational church, 74, 112

Congress and frontiersmen, 252-253

Connecticut, frontier towns, 42, 45, 53; land policy, 76

Connecticut River, 52, 53, 72

Connecticut Valley, 63, 73

Conquest, 269

Conscience, American, 328

Constitution, U. S., 209, 244

Constitutional convention of 1787, 249

Constitutions, state, 121, 252, 352; reconstruction, 192

Coöperation, voluntary, 165, 257, 258

Corn, areas, 149; belt, 151

Corporations, 265, 328

Cotton culture, 28, 139, 255; early extension, 7; transfer from the East to Mississippi Valley, 194

"Cotton Kingdom," 174, 189, 194, 198

Coureurs de bois, 182

Cow pens, 16, 88

Crockett, Davy, 105

Crops, migration, 149

Currency, 148; evil, 32; expansion, 210

Cutler, Manasseh, 141

Dairy interests in Wisconsin, 234, 236

Dakotas, settlement, 145, 146

Darien, Ga., 98

Davis, Jefferson, 105, 139, 174

De Bow, J. D. B., 197

De Bow's Review, 217

Debs, E. V., 281

Dedham, 40, 58

Deerfield, 48, 52, 58, 70

Democracy, 32, 54, 306; doubts of, 280; established in Old West, 107; free land and, 274; frontier, early, 106; frontier and, 30, 31, 247, 249; Godkin on, 307; in early 18th century, 98; Jacksonian, 192, 302, 342-343; Jeffersonian, 250, 251; magnitude of achievement in the West, 258; Middle West, 154; Mississippi Valley, 183; neighborhood, 346; new type in West, 210, 216; Ohio Valley, influence, 172; Ohio Valley and, 175; organized, 357; origin, 293; outcome of American experiences, 266; pressure on the universities, 283; significance of Mississippi Valley in promoting, 190; Upland South, 165; Western contributions, 243; Western ideals, 261; see also Pioneer democracy

Democratic party, 327, 330; basis, 248; Middle Western wing, 352

Democratic-Republican party, 250

Denver, Colo., 19

De Tocqueville. See Tocqueville

Detroit, 135, 150

Development, American, 205, 221; four changes, 244; personal, 271; significant decade, 246-247; study of, 10; true point of view, 3; Western, 218

D'Iberville. See Iberville

Discovery, 271, 293, 301, 306

Doddridge, Joseph, 115

Dogs for hunting Indians, 45

Douglas, S. A., 140; Lincoln debates, 230

Douglas, William, 109

Down east, 79

Dracut, 111

Dreams, 301, 339

Duel, 253

Duluth, 150, 151, 234

Dunkards, 263

Dunstable, 48, 56

Duquesne, Abraham, 14

Dwight, Timothy (1752-1817), 63; fears of pioneer class, 251

East, efforts to restrict advance of frontier, 33, 34; fears of the West, 208; out of touch with West, 18

Economic forces and political institutions, 243

Economic historian, 332

Economic legislation and Ohio Valley, 170

Education, 282; Middle West, 156

Edwards, Jonathan, 63

Egleston, Melville, 55

Eliot, C. W., on corporation, 265; on democracy and slavery, 256

Emerson, R. W., 353; on Lincoln, 256

England, decrease of dependence on, 23; Mississippi Valley and, 180, 186; Old Northwest and, 131, 134

English pioneers, 270

English settlers in Michigan and Wisconsin, 226

English stock and English speech, 23

Equality, 274; New England, 61, 62, 63; Western settlers, 212

Erie Canal, 7, 136, 195, 197

Europe, American democracy and, 282; how America reacted on, 3; Southeastern, 294, 295, 316

Europeans, 267

Evolution, American, as key to history, 11

Expansion, 206, 219, 304, 345; Ohio Valley and, 166; world politics, 246

Experts, 284, 285, 286

"Fall line," 4, 9, 68; efforts to establish military frontier on, 84

Fairfax, Lord, 92, 123

Far East, 315

Far West, 315, 341

Farm lands, 297

Farm machinery, 276

Farmers, 238, 239

Farmer's frontier, 12, 16, 18

Federal colonial system, 168, 169

Federal Reserve districts, 322

Fertility, 129

Field, Marshall, 265

Finance, 318, 325; pioneer ideas, 148

Fire-arms and Indians, 13

Firmin, Giles, 56

Food supply, 279, 294, 314

Foreign parentage, Indiana and Illinois, 232; Michigan, 233; Western States, 237; Wisconsin, 233-234

Foreign policy, 168, 219

Forest Service, 320

Forest philosophy, 207

"Foresters," 63

Forests, 270, 293; Middle West, 130

Fortified houses, 71

Fourierists, 263

France, efforts to revive empire in America, 167; Middle West and, 131; Mississippi Valley and, 180, 186; western exploration, 163;

Franchise, 249-250, 252

Franklin, Benjamin, Mississippi Valley and, 182; on the Germans, 109

Free Soil party, 141, 173, 217

French explorers, 163

French frontier, 125

French settlers in Michigan and Wisconsin, 226

Frontier, conservative attitude toward advance, 63; definition, 3, 41; demand for independent statehood, 248; efforts to check and restrict it, 33; evil effects, 32; extinction, 1, 9, 38, 39, 321; farmers, 239, 240; first official, 39, 54; French, 125; importance as a military training school, 15; influence toward democracy, 247, 249; kinds and modes of advance, 12; Massachusetts, 65; military, of Old West, 106-107; religious aspects, 36; Spanish, 125; towns in Massachusetts, 42, 45, 53, 70; various comparisons, 10

Frontiersmen, 206, 209, 212; in Congress, 252-253; Mississippi Valley, 182; Virginia idea, 86

Fulton, Robert, 171

Fur trade, 13; England after Revolution, 131; Hudson River, 80; Southern, Old West, 87

Gallatin, Albert, 191, 252, 317

Galveston, 202

Garfield, J. A., 241

Geographic factors, 329

Geographic provinces, 158

Georgia, 174, 196; restriction of land tenure, 97; settlement, 97

Germanic germs, 3, 4

Germans, 263; in New York in early times, 5; Middle West and, 137-138, 146; Palatine, 5, 82, 100, 109, 124; political exiles, 349; sectaries, 164; Wisconsin, 23, 227, 236; zone of settlement in Great Valley, 102

Glarus, 236

Glenn, James, 23, 108

Godkin, E. L., 307

Goochland County, Va., 93

Government, 321; paternal, 328; popular, 357

Government discipline, 356

Government expeditions, 17

Government intervention, 344

Government ownership, 148

Government powers, 307

Government regulation, 281

Granger movement, 148, 203, 218, 276, 281

Grant, U. S., 142

Granville, Lord, 95, 123

Great Lakes, 128, 149, 150, 173, 297

Great Plains, 8, 128, 147; Indian trade and war, 144

Great Valley, 100; colonization, 100-101

Greater South, 174

Greeley, Horace, 104

Green Mountain Boys, 78

Greenback movement, 148, 203, 218, 276

Greenway manor, 92

Groseilliers, 180

Groton, 48, 57

Grund, F. J., 7

Grundy, Felix, 192

Gulf coast, 295

Gulf States, 141; occupation, 139

Hammond, J. H., on slavery problem in the Mississippi Valley, 198

Hanna, Marcus, 265

Harriman, E. H., 280, 318

Harrison, W. H., 168, 173, 189, 192, 213, 255

Hart, A. B., 177

Hartford, 76

Haverhill, 51, 62

Hayes, R. B., 241

Henry, Patrick, 94

Heroes, 254, 256; Western, 213

High thinking, 287

Higher law, 239

Hill, J. J., 260

Historian, 333

Historic ideals, 306, 335

Historical societies, 159-160, 339

History, character, 331-332; new viewpoints, 330

Holland, J. G., 73

Holst, H. E. von, 24

Home markets, 108, 216

Home missions, 36, 354

Homestead law of 1862, 145, 276

Hoosier State, 224

Housatonic River, 71

Housatonic Valley, 72

Houston, Sam, 105

Howells, W. D., 353

Hudson River, 53, 79; frontier, 43; fur trade, 80

Humanitarian movement, 327

Huxley, T. H., on modern civilization, 300

Iberville, P. le M. d', 180

Icarians, 263

Idealists, America the goal, 261; social, 349

Ideals, 239; American, and the West, 290; American, loyalty to, 307; American historic, 306, 335; immigrants, 264; Middle West, 153; Mississippi Valley, 203; pioneer, and the State university, 269; readjustment, 321, 328; Western, 209, 214, 267; Western democracy and, 261

Illinois, composite nationality, 232; elements of settlement, 225; settlement, 135

Illiteracy in Middle West, 353

Immigrants, 277; idealism, 264

Immigration, 146, 215, 316

Indian guides, 17

Indian policy, 10

Indian question, early, 9

Indian reservations, 278

Indian trade, 6, 13, 14; Middle West, 143, 144

Indian wars, 9; New England and, 69; Ohio Valley and, 167

Indiana, character, 232; constitution, 282; elements in settlement, 223-224; settlement, 134

Indianapolis, 162, 229

Indians, buffer state for England, 131, 134; congresses to treat with, 15; effects of trades on, 13; hunting Indians with dogs, 45; influence on Puritans and New England, 44; Middle West and, 133, 134; society, 13

Individualism, 30, 32, 37, 78, 125, 140, 203, 254, 259, 271, 273, 302, 306; in the Old West, 107; reaction against, 307; Upland South, 165

Industrial conditions, 280, 281, 285; Middle West, 149, 154; Mississippi Valley, 194, 201; Ohio Valley and, 175

Industry, captains of, and large undertakings, 258, 259, 260; control, 318

Inland waterways, 202

Insurgent movement, 327

Intellectual life and the frontier, 37

Intercolonial congresses, 15

Interior and coast, antagonisms, 110

Internal commerce, 171, 188

Internal improvements, 27, 28, 29, 111, 170, 172, 216, 257; after 1812 to break down barrier to West, 195; Old West, 109

Internal trade, Old West, 108, 109

Iowa, 141, 143; elements and growth, 229; settlement, 137

Ipswich, 56

Irish, 350

Iron mines in Middle West, 152

Iron ore, 313

Iroquois Indians, 13, 80

Irrigation, 258, 279

Isms, 239

Izard, Ralph, 274

Jackson, Andrew, 105, 168, 173, 189, 206, 213, 216, 241, 252, 253, 268, 326; personification of frontier traits, 252, 254

Jackson, Stonewall, 105

Jacksonian democracy, 192, 302, 342-343

James River, 84, 90; settlement, 93

Jefferson, Thomas, 93, 105, 114, 268; conception of democracy, 250, 251; on England and the Mississippi, 186; on the pioneer in Congress, 253; on the importance of the Mississippi Valley, 188

"Jim River" Valley, 145

Johnson, R. M., 192

Johnson, Sir William, 81, 104

Justice, direct forms in the West, 212

Kansas, 142, 144, 146, 151; Populists, 238; settlers, 237

Kansas City, 151

Kentucky, 19, 122, 162, 167, 168, 169, 192, 225, 253; slavery, 174

King Philip's War 40, 46, 69

Kipling, Rudyard, "Foreloper," 270; "Son of the English," 262

Labor, combinations, 245; composition of laboring class, 316

Labor theorists, 303, 326

Lamar, L. Q. C. (1825-1893), 25

Lancaster, Mass., 48, 57, 61

Land, 328-329; abundance, 274; abundance, as basis of democracy, 191, 192; alien tenure, 110; free, exhausted, 244-245; free Western, 211, 259; fundamental fact in Western society, 211; "mongering," 61; see also Public lands

Land companies, 123, 347

Land grants, 9; for schools and colleges, 74; to railroads, 276

Land Ordinance of 1785, 132

Land policies, 10

Land system, "equality" principle in New England, 61, 62, 63; Georgia, 97; later federal, 123; New England, 54; New England conflicts, 75; New York State, 80; North Carolina, 95; Old West, 122; Pennsylvania, 101; Virginia, 91; Virginia grants to societies, 85

La Salle, 180

Laurentide glacier, 129

Law and order, 298, 344

Leadership, 213, 291, 292, 307; educated, 286

Lease, Mary Ellen, 240

Legislation, 277, 307; frontier and, 24;

Leicester, 59

Leigh, B. W., 115

Lewis and Clark, 13, 17

Liberty, Bacon on, 286; for universities, 287; individual, 213; Western, 212

Life as a whole, 287

Lincoln, Abraham, 105, 135, 142, 174, 206, 213, 217, 225, 241, 268, 304, 356; Douglas debates, 230; embodiment of pioneer period, 255-256; Ohio Valley, influence of, 175

Lincoln, C. H., 113

Litchfield, 71, 76, 124

Livingston manor, 81, 82

Locofocos, 303, 326, 348

Log cabin, 338

"Log cabin campaign," 173

London Company, 301

Loria, Achille, 11

Louisiana, 180, 208

Louisiana Purchase, 25, 34, 140, 167, 213, 251; effect on Mississippi Valley, 189-190

Louisville, 162

Lowell, J. R., on Lincoln, 255

Loyal Land Co., 123, 182

Lumber industry, 152; Wisconsin, 234-235

Lumbermen, 272, 273

Lynch law, 212, 272; New England, 78

McKinley, William, 236, 237, 241

Magnitude, 258, 260, 276

Maine, 52-53

Maine coast, 79

Mallet brothers, 180

Manila, battle of, 247

Manorial practice in New York, 83

Marietta, 124, 133, 223, 257

"Mark colonies," 70

Marquette, Jacques, 180

Martineau, Harriet, 214, 303, 339

Massachusetts, attempt to locate frontier line, 39; frontier, 65; frontier towns, 42, 45, 53, 70; locating towns before settlement, 76

Mather, Cotton, attitude as to advancing frontier, 63

Mesabi mines, 152, 234

Mendon, 57

Methodists, 238

Mexico, 295

Michigan, 135-136, 137; development and resources, 233; settlement, 226, 228

Middle region, 27; in formation of the Old West, 79; typical American, 28

Middle West, agriculture, 150; Canada and, 128; Civil War and, 142; early society, 153-154; education, 282; elements of settlement--Northern and Southern, 346, 351; Europe and, 282; flow of population into, 132-133; forests, 130; Germans and, 137-138; Germans and Scandinavians, 146; idealism, 153; immigrants of varied nationalities, 349; importance, 126, 128; increase of settlement in the fifties, 142-143; industrial organism, 149; meaning of term, 126; nationalism, 142; natural resources, 129; New England element, 137; peculiarity and influence, 347; pioneer democracy, 335; settlement, 135, 342; slavery question and, 139; southern zone, 138

Migration, 21, 237, 337; communal vs. individual, 125; crops, 149; interstate, 224; labor, 62; New England, and land policy, 77

Militant expansive movement, 105

Military frontier, 41, 47; early form, 47; Old West, significance, 106-107; Virginia in later 17th century, 83, 84

Milwaukee, 137, 227, 236, 350

Miner's frontier, 12

Mining camps, 9

Mining laws, 10

Minneapolis, 137, 151, 234

Minnesota, 143, 144, 237; economic development, 234; Historical Society, 335, 338-339

Missions to the Indians, 79

Mississippi Company, 123, 182

Mississippi River, 7, 9, 142, 185, 194, 345

Mississippi Valley, 10, 139, 166-167, 324; beginning of stratification, 197; Civil War and, 201; democracy and, 190; early population, 183; economic progress after 1812, 194; England's efforts to control, 180-181; extent, 179; French explorers in, 180; frontiersmen's allegiance, 186-187; idealism, social order, 203-204; industrial growth after the Civil War, 201-202; political power and growth from 1810 to 1840, 193; primitive history, 179; question of severance from the Union, 187; significance in American history, 177, 185; slavery struggle and, 201; social forces, early, 183

Missouri, 192

Missouri Compromise, 140, 174, 226

Missouri Valley, 135

Mohawk Valley, 68, 82

Monroe, James, 150

Monroe Doctrine, 296; germ, 168

Monticello, 93

Moravians, 95, 102

Morgan, J. P., 318

Mormons, 263

Morris, Gouverneur, 207

Nashaway, 57

National problem, 293

Nationalism, 29; evils of, 157; Middle West and, 142

Nationalities, mixture, 27; replacement in Wisconsin, 235

Naturalization, 110

Nebraska, 144, 145, 220; settlers, 237

Negro, 295

New England, 27, 301; back lands, 75; coast vs. interior, 111; colonies from, 124; culmination of frontier movement, 78; early official frontier line, 43; economic life, 78; effect on the West, 36; foreign element, 294; frontier protection, 46-47; frontier types, 43-44; Greater New England, 66, 70; ideas, and Middle West, 348; Indian wars, 69; land system, 54; Middle West and, 347; Ohio settlement and, 223; Old West and, 68; Old West and interior New England, 70; pioneer type, 239; streams of settlement from, 215; two New Englands of the formative period of the Old West, 78-79

New Englanders in the Middle West, 137; in Wisconsin and the lake region, 228; three movements of advance from the coast, 136; Westernized, 215, 216

New Glarus, 236

New Hampshire, 69, 72, 77, 111

New Hampshire grants, 77

New Northwest, 222

New Orleans, 136, 137, 167, 187, 188, 189, 217, 295

New South, 218; Old West and, 100

New West, 257

New York City, 136, 195, 318

New York State, early frontier, 43; lack of expansive power, 80; land system, 80; settlement from New England, 83; western, 230

Newspapers of the Middle West, 353

Nitrates, 279

Norfolk, 195

North Carolina, 87, 106; coast vs. upland, 116; in Indiana Settlement, 224; public lands, 95; settlement, 94, 95; slavery, 122; taxation, 118, 119

North Central States, 126; region as a whole, 341

North Dakota, development, 237

Northampton, 63

Northfield, 53

Northwest, democracy, 356; Old and New, 222; see also Old Northwest

Northwest Territory, 222

Northwestern boundary, 324

Norton, C. E., 208-209

Norwegians, 232

Nullification, 117, 254

Ohio, diversity of interests, 231-232; elements of settlement, 223; history, 133-134; New England element, 223; Southern contribution to settlement, 223

Ohio Company, 123, 133, 141, 182, 223

Ohio River, 5, 161

Ohio Valley, 104; as a highway, 162; economic legislation and, 170; effects on national expansion, 166; in American history, 157; influence on Lincoln, 175; part in making of the nation, 160; physiography, 160-161; relation to the South, 174; religious spirit, 164, 165; stock and settlement, 164

Oil wells, 297

Oklahoma, 278, 297

Old National road, 136

Old Northwest, 131, 132, 136, 221; as a whole, 241-242; defined, 218; elements of settlement, 222; political position, 236; social origin, 222-223; Southern element in settlement, 223, 225-226; turning point of control, 229

"Old South," 166

Old West, colonization of areas beyond the mountains, 124; consequences of formation, 106; New South and, 100; summary of frontier movement in 17th and early 18th centuries, 98; term defined, 68

Old World, 261, 267, 294, 299, 344, 349; effect of American frontier, 22; West and, 206, 210

Opportunity, 37, 212, 239, 259-260, 261, 263, 271-272, 342, 343

Orangeburg, 96

Ordinance of 1787, 25, 132, 168, 190, 223

Oregon country, 144

Orient, 297

Osgood, H. L., 30

Pacific coast, 168, 219, 304

Pacific Northwest, 296

Pacific Ocean, 297, 315

Packing industries, 151

Palatine Germans, 5, 22, 100, 109, 124; New York State and, 82

Palisades, 71

Panama Canal, 295

Panics, 279-280

Paper money, 32, 111, 121, 122, 209

Parkman, Francis, 70, 72, 144, 163

"Particular plantations," 41

Past, lessons of, 355

Patroon estates, 80

Paxton Boys, 112

Pecks "New Guide to the West," 19

Penn, William, 262

Pennsylvania, 23, 27; coast and interior, antagonisms, 112; German settlement, 82, 100; Great Valley of, 68, 164; land grants, 101; new Pennsylvania of the Great Valley, 100; Scotch-Irish, 103, 104; settlement Of Old West part, 83

Pennsylvania Dutch, 22, 100, 110

Perrot, Nicolas, 180

Philadelphia, 106; trade, 108

Physiographic provinces, 127

Piedmont, 68; Virginia, 87, 89

Pig iron, 152, 313

Pine, 151

Pine belt in Middle West, 143

Pioneer democracy, lessons learned, 357; Middle West, 335

Pioneer farmers, 21, 206, 257

Pioneers, conservative fears about, 251, 252; contest with capitalist, 325; contrast of conditions, 279; deeper significance, 338; essence, 271; ideals and the State university, 269; Middle West, 146, 154; Ohio Valley, 167; old ideals, 148; sketch, 19

Pittsburgh, 104, 127, 136, 154-155, 161, 265, 299, 314, 324

Plain people, 256, 267

Political institutions, 243; frontier and, 24

Political parties, 249, 324

Polk, J. K., 105, 192, 255

Pontiac, 131, 144

Poor whites, 224

Population center, 222

Populists, 32, 127, 147, 155, 203, 220, 247, 277, 281, 305; Kansas, 238

Prairie Plains, 129

Prairie states, 239

Prairies, 218, 236, 276, 348; settlement, 145, 147

Presbyterians, 105, 106, 109, 164

Presidency, 254; Mississippi Valley and, 192; Ohio Valley and, 175; Old Northwest and, 222

Prices, 313

Princeton college, 106

Pritchett, H. S., 282

Privilege, 192; conflict against, 120, 121

Proclamation of 1763, 181

Progressive Republican movement, 321

Prohibitionists, 240

"Proletariat," 285

Property, 210; as basis of suffrage, 249

Prosperity, 281

Protection. See Tariff

Provinces, geographic, 158

Provincialism, desirable, 157, 159

Prussianism, 337, 356

Public lands, 25, 132, 303; policy of America, 26, 170; Western lands, first debates on, 191

Public schools, 266, 282

Puget Sound, 298

Puritan ideals, 73, 75, 78; German conflict with, 138

Puritanism, 27

Puritans and Indians, 44

Purrysburg, 97

Pynchon, John, 51, 52

Quakers, 105, 112, 164; in settlement of Indiana, 224

Quebec, Province of, 131

Quincy, Josiah, 208

Radisson, Sieur de, 180

Railroads, administration by regions, 322; Chicago and, 150; continental, 247; in early fifties, 137; land grants to, 276; Mississippi Valley, 304; northwestern, 145; origin, 14; speculative movement, 276; statistics, 314; western, 218

Rancher's frontier, 12, 16

Ranches, 9, 16; Virginia, 88

Rappahannock River, 84, 90; settlement, 93

Reclamation, 298

Reclamation Service, 320

Red Cloud (Indian), 144

Red River valley, 145

Redemptioners, 22, 90, 97, 100

Reformers, 281, 324; social, 262-263

Regulation, War of the, 248

Regulators, 116, 119, 120, 212

Religion of the Middle West, 345

Religious freedom of the Old West, 121

Religious spirit, Ohio Valley, 164, 165; Upland South, 164, 165

Rensselaerswyck, 80

Representation, 114, 117, 120

Republican party, 327

Research, 284, 287, 331

Revolution, American, 30

Rhodes, J. F., 24

Richmond, Va., 108

Rights, equal, 326-327, 338; of man, 192

Ripley, W. Z., 316

Robertson, James, 105, 187

Rockefeller, J. D., 260, 264-265

Rocky Mountains, 8, 9, 10, 298

Roosevelt, Theodore, 202, 204, 281, 319, 327; on the Mississippi Valley, 178; "Winning of the West," 67

Root, Elihu, 159

Roxbury, 59

Royce, Josiah, 157, 358

Rush, Richard, 317

St. Louis, 151, 161, 229

St. Paul, 137, 234

Salisbury, Mass., 56

Salt, 17; annual pilgrimage to coast for, 17

Salt springs, 17, 18

Salzburgers, 97

Sandys, Sir Edwin, 301

Sault Ste. Marie Canal, 149

Scalps, Massachusetts bounty for, 45

Scandinavians, 263, 350; Middle West, 146; Western life, 232-233, 234

Schools, early difficulties, 107; see also Public schools

Schurz, Carl, 337

Science, 284, 330-331

Scientific farming, 294

Scotch Highlanders, 104; Georgia, 98

Scotch-Irish, 5, 22, 71; migration in Great Valley and Piedmont, 103; Pennsylvania, 104; South Carolina, 97; Virginia, 86, 91-92

Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, 105, 109, 164

Scovillites, 116

Seaboard cities, 194, 195, 196

Seattle, 298

"Section" of land, 123, 132

Sectionalism, 27, 28, 52, 157, 215, 220, 321

Sections, relation, 159

Self-government, 169, 190, 207, 248, 275

Self-made man, 219, 318

Servants, 60, 353

Service to the Union, 358

Settlement, community type, 73, 74

Settler, 20

Sevier, John, 105, 187

Seward, W. H., 141; on the Northwest, 230; on the slavery issue in the Mississippi Valley, 199, 200

Shays' Rebellion, 112, 119, 122, 249

Sheffield, 71

Sheldon, George, 58

Shenandoah Valley, 68, 90, 91, 92, 99, 105

Sherman, W. T., 142

Sibley, H. H. (1811-1891), 272, 273, 328

Silver movement, 238, 239, 329

Simsbury, 63

Singletary, Amos, 240

Sioux Indians, 130

Six Nations, 15, 83

Slavery question, 24, 29, 98, 111, 139, 304, 330; compromise movement, 174; democracy and, 256; expansion, 174; Middle West and, 139; Mississippi Valley and, 198, 201; Northwest and, 230; slaves as property, 115; Virginia and North Carolina, 122

Smith, Major Lawrence, 84

Social control, 277

Social forces, in American history, 311; mode of investigating, 330; on the Atlantic coast, 295; political institutions and, 243

Social mobility, 355

Social order, Mississippi Valley, 203-204; new, 263

Social reformers, 262-263

Socialism, 246, 277, 307, 321

Society, backwoods, 212; rebirth of in the West, 205

Soils, 278, 279; search for, 18

Solid South, 217

South, 27, 166, 218; contribution to settlement of Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), 223, 225-226; Ohio Valley and, 174; solid, 217; transforming forces, 295; West and, 196, 197; see also Upland South

South Carolina, 174; condition of antagonism between coast and interior, 116; land system, townships, 96; trade, 108

South Dakota, development, 237

Southeastern Europe, 294, 299, 316

Southerners and the Middle West, 133-134, 135, 138

Southwest, 297

Spain, 167, 181, 246; Mississippi Valley and, 184, 185

Spangenburg, A. G., 17

Spanish America 181, 182, 295

Spanish frontier, 125

Spanish War, 246

Speculation, 319

Spoils system, 32, 254

Spotswood, Alexander, 22, 88, 90, 91, 113, 247; Mississippi Valley and, 180

Spotsylvania County, Va., 90

Spreckles, Claus, 265

Squatter-sovereignty, 140

Squatters, 272, 343; doctrines, 273, 328; ideal, 320; Middle West, 137; Ohio Valley, 170; Pennsylvania in 1726, 101

Stark, John, 103-104

State historical societies, 340

State lines, 127

State universities, 221, 354; as safeguard of democracy, 286; Michigan, 233; peculiar power, 283-284; pioneer ideals and, 269, 281

States, checkerboard, 218; frontier pioneers' demand for statehood, 248; groups, 159; new states vs. Atlantic States, 207; System of, 168

Staunton, Va., 92

Steam navigation, 7, 135, 171

Steel, 313

Steel and iron industry, 152

Stockbridge, 79

Stoddard, Solomon, 45

Success, 288, 309

Sudbury, 39

Suffrage, 192, 216; basis, 249; frontier and extension, 30; manhood, 250, 352

Superior, Lake, 180, 314; iron mines, 152

Swedes, 233

Symmes Purchase, 223

Talleyrand, 299

Taney, R. B., 141

Tariff, 25, 27, 170, 172, 197, 216

Taylor, Zachary, 255

Tecumthe, 134, 144

Tennessee, 122, 168, 187, 225, 252, 253; democracy, 192

Tennyson's "Ulysses," 310

Territories, system of, 168, 169

Texas, 168

Thomas, J. B., 174

Tocqueville, A. C. H. C. de, 153, 275, 303, 343

Toledo, Ohio, 231

Toleration, 355

Town meeting, 62

Towns, legislating into existence, 125; locating, Massachusetts, 76; New England and Virginia, 41; new settlements in New England, 55; South Carolina, 96; typical form of establishing in New England, 74; Virginia, 85, 86

Trader's frontier, 12; effects following, 12; rapidity of advance, 12, 13

Trading posts, 14

Transportation, 148; Great Lakes, 150

Tryon, William, 106

Tuscarora War, 94, 95

Ulstermen, 103

Unification of the West, 215

United States, collection of nations, 158; development since 1890, 311; federal aspect, 159; fundamental forces, 311; original contribution to society, 281-282; wealth, 312

U. S. Steel Corporation, 152-153, 247, 265, 313

Universities, duties, 292; function, 287; influence of university men, 285; need of freedom, 287; pressure of democracies on, 283; State and, 286; see also State universities

Upland South, 164; religious spirit, 164, 165

Van Buren, Martin, 254, 326

Van Rensselaer manor, 81

Vandalia, 229

Verendryes, the, 180

Vermont, 69, 72, 77, 78, 111, 122, 136

Vermonters in Wisconsin and Michigan, 228

Vicksburg, 201

Vigilance committees, 212

Vinton, S. F., 141, 229

Virginia, 301; early attempt to establish frontier, 41; Indian wars, 69-70; inequalities, coast vs. interior, 113; interest in Mississippi Valley, 182; land grants, 91; land grants to societies, 85; Piedmont, society, 95; Piedmont portions, 87, 89; settlement in latter part of 17th century, 83; slavery, 122; two Virginias in later 17th century, 94; Western democracy and, 250

Virginia Convention of 1829-30, 28, 31

Visions, 270, 331, 339-340

Voyageurs, 17

Wachovia, 95

Walker, F. A., 128

War of 1812, 168, 213

Washington, George, 92, 124; Mississippi Valley and, 181, 182, 194, 196, 324; Ohio Valley and, 163, 167

Wealth, 213-214, 219, 288, 319; democracy versus, 192; in politics, 173; United States, 312

Wells (town), 47

"Welsh tract," 97

Wentworth, Benning, 77

West, American ideals and, 290; beginning of, 6; center of interest, 327; constructive force, 206; contributions to democracy, 243; factor in American history, 1, 3; ideals, 209, 214, 267; indefiniteness of term, 126; insurgent voice, 319; main streams of settlement, 215; mark of New England, 36; phase of division, 216-217; population, 35; problem of, 205; South and, 196, 197; warnings against, 208, 209; Middle West; see also Old West; Old Northwest

West Virginia, 114

Westchester County, N. Y., 81

Western colleges, 36

Western life, dominant forces, 222

Western Reserve, 124, 133

Western spirit, 310

"Western Waters," 161, 206, 302; men of freedom and independence, 183

"Western World," 161, 166, 206, 302; basis of its civilization, 177

Wheat, 329; areas, 149

Whig party, 27, 173, 304, 351

White, Abraham, 240

White, Hugh, 192

Whitman, Walt, 336

Wilderness, 262, 269, 270, 279

Wilkinson, James, 169, 187

Williams, John (1664-1729), 70

Williams, Roger, 262

Windsor, 76

Winthrop, John, 62

Wisconsin, 137, 138, 218, 294, 341; development and elements, 233-234; German element, 227, 228, 236; New England element, 228; settlement, 226, 227

Wood, Abraham, 98

Woodstock, 59

World's fairs, 156

World-politics, 246, 315

Wyoming Valley, 79, 124

Yemassee War, 95

"Young America" doctrine, 140


* * * * *


Transcriber's Notes:

The following words appear in the text with and without hyphens. They have been left as in the original.

battle-field battlefield coast-wise coastwise cow-pens cowpens head-rights headrights iron-master ironmaster new-comers newcomers non-sectional nonsectional out-vote outvote rail-splitter railsplitters sea-board seaboard slave-holding slaveholding tide-water tidewater un-won unwon

The following corrections have been made to the text:

page 25--as the nation marched westward.[period is missing in original]

page 40, footnote 40:5--"American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,"[quotation mark missing in original]

page 48, footnote 48:4--Sheldon, "Deerfield,"[quotation mark missing in original]

page 49--your honours [original has opening parenthesis]we haue but litel laft

page 53--the frontier Towns.[original has extraneous quotation mark]

page 68, footnote 68:1--Powell, "Physiographic Regions[original has extraneous single quote]"

page 75, footnote 75:1--Egleston[original has Eggleston], "Land System of the New England Colonies,"

page 86--at least three foot within the ground."[quotation mark missing in original]

page 96, footnote 96:3--(N. Y., 1899)[closing parenthesis missing in original], pp. 149, 151;

page 117, footnote 117:3--pp. 440-447[original has 440-437]

page 118--it was being exploited,[original has period]

page 118, footnote 118:2--N. C.[original has N .C.]

page 123--Preëmption and preëmptions are hyphenated across line breaks in the original. The diaresis has been reinserted in the rejoined words.

page 163--American backwoodsmen[original has backswoodsmen]

page 167--to add the settlements[original has setlements]

page 171--social conditions of the people whose[original has who] needs

page 236--stronghold of resistance[original has resistence]

page 254--formal law and the subtleties[original has subleties]

page 268--that dwarf [original has extraneous word of] those of the Old World

page 310--to pause, to make an end,[original has period]

page 348--to his own business.[original has extraneous quotation mark]

page 353--at least before [original has extraneous word at] the present day

page 362--Bryan, W. J., 204, 236, 237, 246, 281, 327, 330[original has 329]

page 363, under Democracy--Godkin[original has Gookin] on, 307

page 363--Democratic party, 327, 330[original has 329]

page 363--Discovery, 271[original has 270], 293, 301, 306

page 363--Douglas[original has Douglass], William, 109

page 364--Forest[original has Foreign] Service, 320

page 364, under Germans--Palatine, 5, 82, 100, 109, 124[original also lists page 32 in error]

page 366--Henry, Patrick, 94[original has 95]

page 366, under Indians: hunting Indians with dogs, 45[original has 95]

page 367--Kipling, Rudyard, "Foreloper[original has Toreloper]," 270

page 368--Marietta, 124, 133[original has 132], 223, 257

page 368, under Michigan--development and resources, 233[original has 232]

page 371--Pynchon[original has Pyrichon], John, 51, 52

page 373--Spangenburg[original has Spangenberg], A. G.

Spelling and punctuation errors in quoted material have been left as in the original.

The index entry for James Glenn was after the entry for E. L. Godkin. The two entries were reversed to maintain alphabetical order. Index entries for Leicester and Leigh, B. W., were combined with the Legislation entry. Entries were moved as appropriate.


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