ings of great cities. He decreed that his children should enter
into a heritage of education, comfort, and social welfare, and for this
ideal he bore the scars of the wilderness. Possessed with this idea he
ennobled his task and laid deep foundations for a democratic State. Nor
was this idealism by any means limited to the American pioneer.

To the old native democratic stock has been added a vast army of
recruits from the Old World. There are in the Middle West alone four
million persons of German parentage out of a total of seven millions in
the country. Over a million persons of Scandinavian parentage live in
the same region. The democracy of the newer West is deeply affected by
the ideals brought by these immigrants from the Old World. To them
America was not simply a new home; it was a land of opportunity, of
freedom, of democracy. It meant to them, as to the American pioneer that
preceded them, the opportunity to destroy the bonds of social caste that
bound them in their older home, to hew out for themselves in a new
country a destiny proportioned to the powers that God had given them, a
chance to place their families under better conditions and to win a
larger life than the life that they had left behind. He who believes
that even the hordes of recent immigrants from southern Italy are drawn
to these shores by nothing more than a dull and blind materialism has
not penetrated into the heart of the problem. The idealism and
expectation of these children of the Old World, the hopes which they
have formed for a newer and freer life across the seas, are almost
pathetic when one considers how far they are from the possibility of
fruition. He who would take stock of American democracy must not forget
the accumulation of human purposes and ideals which immigration has
added to the American populace.

In this connection it must also be remembered that these democratic
ideals have existed at each stage of the advance of the frontier, and
have left behind them deep and enduring effects on the thinking of the
whole country. Long after the frontier period of a particular region of
the United States has passed away, the conception of society, the ideals
and aspirations which it produced, persist in the minds of the people.
So recent has been the transition of the greater portion of the United
States from frontier conditions to conditions of settled life, that we
are, over the large portion of the United States, hardly a genera