e: the regulators of the Carolinas were
the predecessors of the claims associations of Iowa and the vigilance
committees of California. But the individual was not ready to submit to
complex regulations. Population was sparse, there was no multitude of
jostling interests, as in older settlements, demanding an elaborate
system of personal restraints. Society became atomic. There was a
reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a
crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law
of the land. Substantial justice, secured in the most direct way, was
the ideal of the backwoodsman. He had little patience with finely drawn
distinctions or scruples of method. If the thing was one proper to be
done, then the most immediate, rough and ready, effective way was the
best way.

It followed from the lack of organized political life, from the atomic
conditions of the backwoods society, that the individual was exalted and
given free play. The West was another name for opportunity. Here were
mines to be seized, fertile valleys to be preempted, all the natural
resources open to the shrewdest and the boldest. The United States is
unique in the extent to which the individual has been given an open
field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order, or of scientific
administration of government. The self-made man was the Western man's
ideal, was the kind of man that all men might become. Out of his
wilderness experience, out of the freedom of his opportunities, he
fashioned a formula for social regeneration,--the freedom of the
individual to seek his own. He did not consider that his conditions were
exceptional and temporary.

Under such conditions, leadership easily develops,--a leadership based
on the possession of the qualities most serviceable to the young
society. In the history of Western settlement, we see each forted
village following its local hero. Clay, Jackson, Harrison, Lincoln, were
illustrations of this tendency in periods when the Western hero rose to
the dignity of national hero.

The Western man believed in the manifest destiny of his country. On his
border, and checking his advance, were the Indian, the Spaniard, and the
Englishman. He was indignant at Eastern indifference and lack of
sympathy with his view of his relations to these peoples; at the
short-sightedness of Eastern policy. The closure of the Mississippi by
Spain, and the proposal to exchange our claim of freedo