prairies found it
possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor
of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free
working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the
mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible
by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works
must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in utilization of
the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was
required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the
destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.

Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since
the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose
greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The
conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The
old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to
the rights of competitive individual development, together with the
stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest
and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the
development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade
have marked the West.

Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development
of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered.
There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a
steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of
Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent
in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an
ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other,
dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems,
have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the
strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent
captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control
the fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the way of
recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to
the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net
result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the
following:--

Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has
continually lain on the western border of the