ad. The rail-splitter himself became the nation's President
in that fierce time of struggle, and armies of the woodsmen and pioneer
farmers recruited in the Old Northwest made free the Father of Waters,
marched through Georgia, and helped to force the struggle to a
conclusion at Appomattox. The free pioneer democracy struck down the
slave-holding aristocracy on its march to the West.

The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that
deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each
new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with
larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of
Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as
large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers
that followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a
region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New
England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed
the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men
who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of
the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West
dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former experience.
The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains,
the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement
for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to
give way to cooperation and to governmental activity. Even in the
earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had
been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but
this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the
powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War,
the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to
States for education, to railroads for the construction of
transportation lines.

Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon
the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves
which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy. The
pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a
flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with
little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial
independence. Even the homesteader on the Western