s, "Their one
primary and predominant object is to cultivate and settle these
prairies, forests, and vast waste lands. The striking and peculiar
characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy
as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation, and
capitalization of its enormous territory. The United States are
primarily a commercial society, and only secondarily a nation." Of
course, this involves a serious misapprehension. By the very fact of the
task here set forth, far-reaching ideals of the state and of society
have been evolved in the West, accompanied by loyalty to the nation
representative of these ideals. But M. Boutmy's description hits the
substantial fact, that the fundamental traits of the man of the interior
were due to the free lands of the West. These turned his attention to
the great task of subduing them to the purposes of civilization, and to
the task of advancing his economic and social status in the new
democracy which he was helping to create. Art, literature, refinement,
scientific administration, all had to give way to this Titanic labor.
Energy, incessant activity, became the lot of this new American. Says a
traveler of the time of Andrew Jackson, "America is like a vast
workshop, over the door of which is printed in blazing characters, 'No
admittance here, except on business.'" The West of our own day reminds
Mr. Bryce "of the crowd which Vathek found in the hall of Eblis, each
darting hither and thither with swift steps and unquiet mien, driven to
and fro by a fire in the heart. Time seems too short for what they have
to do, and the result always to come short of their desire."

But free lands and the consciousness of working out their social
destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and
devote him to a restless existence. They promoted equality among the
Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences
of the East. Where everybody could have a farm, almost for taking it,
economic equality easily resulted, and this involved political equality.
Not without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal, and it
goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West to-day.

Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The
frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order,
even in the absence of legal authority. If there were cattle thieves,
lynch law was sudden and effectiv