f, in working out its mastery of the resources of the interior, it has
produced a type of industrial leader so powerful as to be the wonder of
the world, nevertheless, it is still to be determined whether these men
constitute a menace to democratic institutions, or the most efficient
factor for adjusting democratic control to the new conditions.

Whatever shall be the outcome of the rush of this huge industrial modern
United States to its place among the nations of the earth, the formation
of its Western democracy will always remain one of the wonderful
chapters in the history of the human race. Into this vast shaggy
continent of ours poured the first feeble tide of European settlement.
European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American
wilderness, and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught
them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained
them in adaptation to the conditions of the New World, to the creation
of new institutions to meet new needs; and ever as society on her
eastern border grew to resemble the Old World in its social forms and
its industry, ever, as it began to lose faith in the ideals of
democracy, she opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies in her
most distant domains with her material treasures and with the ennobling
influence that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that came from
hewing out a home, making a school and a church, and creating a higher
future for his family, furnished to the pioneer.

She gave to the world such types as the farmer Thomas Jefferson, with
his Declaration of Independence, his statute for religious toleration,
and his purchase of Louisiana. She gave us Andrew Jackson, that fierce
Tennessee spirit who broke down the traditions of conservative rule,
swept away the privacies and privileges of officialdom, and, like a
Gothic leader, opened the temple of the nation to the populace. She gave
us Abraham Lincoln, whose gaunt frontier form and gnarled, massive hand
told of the conflict with the forest, whose grasp of the ax-handle of
the pioneer was no firmer than his grasp of the helm of the ship of
state as it breasted the seas of civil war. She has furnished to this
new democracy her stores of mineral wealth, that dwarf those of the Old
World, and her provinces that in themselves are vaster and more
productive than most of the nations of Europe. Out of her bounty has
come a nation whose industrial competition ala