settled area of the United
States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East,
whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to
impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the
free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted
individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would
not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social
subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs
for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative
conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to
become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the
lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free
opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American
democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as
democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and
complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with
primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have
shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial
resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of
democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution.
Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in
the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast
achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of
politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this
training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the world has a
democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross
with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon
the means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of
the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old
historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic
conditions.

But the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under
the conditions of free competition furnished by the West, has produced
the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating
economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under
such conditions can survive. For the old military type of Western
leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, an