nge that it may hardly be recognized.
The pseudo-democracies under the Medici at Florence and under Augustus
at Rome are familiar examples of this type. Or again, if the political
structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by
growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may
rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. In
all these changes both conscious ideals and unconscious social
reorganization are at work.

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

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

First, there is the exhaustion of the supply of free land and the
closing of the movement of Western advance as an effective factor in
American development. The first rough conquest of the wilderness is
accomplished, and that great supply of free lands which year after year
has served to reinforce the democratic influences in the United States
is exhausted. It is true that vast tracts of government land are still
untaken, but they constitute the mountain and arid regions, only a small
fraction of them capable of conquest, and then only by the application
of capital and combined effort. The free lands that made the American
pioneer have gone.

In the second place, contemporaneously with this there has been such a
concentration of capital in the control of fundamental industries as to
make a new epoch in the economic development of the United States. The
iron, the coal, and the cattle of the country have all fallen under the
domination of a few great corporations with allied interests, and by the
rapid