* * * * *

His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,
Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.
Nothing of Europe here,
Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,
Ere any names of Serf and Peer,
Could Nature's equal scheme deface;
New birth of our new soil, the first American."

The pioneer life from which Lincoln came differed in important respects
from the frontier democracy typified by Andrew Jackson. Jackson's
democracy was contentious, individualistic, and it sought the ideal of
local self-government and expansion. Lincoln represents rather the
pioneer folk who entered the forest of the great Northwest to chop out a
home, to build up their fortunes in the midst of a continually ascending
industrial movement. In the democracy of the Southwest, industrial
development and city life were only minor factors, but to the democracy
of the Northwest they were its very life. To widen the area of the
clearing, to contend with one another for the mastery of the industrial
resources of the rich provinces, to struggle for a place in the
ascending movement of society, to transmit to one's offspring the chance
for education, for industrial betterment, for the rise in life which the
hardships of the pioneer existence denied to the pioneer himself, these
were some of the ideals of the region to which Lincoln came. The men
were commonwealth builders, industry builders. Whereas the type of hero
in the Southwest was militant, in the Northwest he was industrial. It
was in the midst of these "plain people," as he loved to call them, that
Lincoln grew to manhood. As Emerson says: "He is the true history of the
American people in his time." The years of his early life were the years
when the democracy of the Northwest came into struggle with the
institution of slavery which threatened to forbid the expansion of the
democratic pioneer life in the West. In President Eliot's essay on "Five
American Contributions to Civilization," he instances as one of the
supreme tests of American democracy its attitude upon the question of
slavery. But if democracy chose wisely and worked effectively toward the
solution of this problem, it must be remembered that Western democracy
took the le