Jackson lived, labor leaders and speculative thinkers were
demanding legislation to place a limit on the amount of land which one
person might acquire and to provide free farms. De Tocqueville saw the
signs of change. "Between the workman and the master," he said, "there
are frequent relations but no real association. . . . I am of the
opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is
growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever existed in
the world; . . . if ever a permanent inequality, of conditions and
aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that
this is the gate by which they will enter." But the sanative influences
of the free spaces of the West were destined to ameliorate labor's
condition, to afford new hopes and new faith to pioneer democracy, and
to postpone the problem.

As the settlers advanced into provinces whose area dwarfed that of the
older sections, pioneer democracy itself began to undergo changes, both
in its composition and in its processes of expansion. At the close of
the Civil War, when settlement was spreading with greatest vigor across
the Mississippi, the railways began their work as colonists. Their land
grants from the government, amounting altogether by 1871 to an area five
times that of the State of Pennsylvania, demanded purchasers, and so the
railroads pioneered the way for the pioneer.

The homestead law increased the tide of settlers. The improved farm
machinery made it possible for him to go boldly out on to the prairie
and to deal effectively with virgin soil in farms whose cultivated area
made the old clearings of the backwoodsman seem mere garden plots. Two
things resulted from these conditions, which profoundly modified pioneer
ideals. In the first place the new form of colonization demanded an
increasing use of capital; and the rapidity of the formation of towns,
the speed with which society developed, made men the more eager to
secure bank credit to deal with the new West. This made the pioneer more
dependent on the eastern economic forces. In the second place the farmer
became dependent as never before on transportation companies. In this
speculative movement the railroads, finding that they had pressed too
far in advance and had issued stock to freely for their earnings to
justify the face of the investment, came into collision with the pioneer
on the question of rates and of discriminations. The Greenback movement
and