iking power against the commerce of Europe that is already
producing consternation in the Old World. Having completed the conquest
of the wilderness, and having consolidated our interests, we are
beginning to consider the relations of democracy and empire.

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

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

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