s were the first Americans to demand fundamental
social changes for the benefit of the workers in the cities. Like the
Western pioneers, they protested against monopolies and special
privilege. But they also had a constructive policy, whereby society was
to be kept democratic by free gifts of the public land, so that surplus
labor might not bid against itself, but might find an outlet in the
West. Thus to both the labor theorist and the practical pioneer, the
existence of what seemed inexhaustible cheap land and unpossessed
resources was the condition of democracy. In these years of the thirties
and forties, Western democracy took on its distinctive form. Travelers
like De Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, came to study and to report
it enthusiastically to Europe.

Side by side with this westward marching army of individualistic
liberty-loving democratic backwoodsmen, went a more northern stream of
pioneers, who cherished similar ideas, but added to them the desire to
create new industrial centers, to build up factories, to build
railroads, and to develop the country by founding cities and extending
prosperity. They were ready to call upon legislatures to aid in this, by
subscriptions to stock, grants of franchises, promotion of banking and
internal improvements. These were the Whig followers of that other
Western leader, Henry Clay, and their early strength lay in the Ohio
Valley, and particularly among the well-to-do. In the South their
strength was found among the aristocracy of the Cotton Kingdom.

Both of these Western groups, Whigs and Democrats alike, had one common
ideal: the desire to leave their children a better heritage than they
themselves had received, and both were fired with devotion to the ideal
of creating in this New World a home more worthy of mankind. Both were
ready to break with the past, to boldly strike out new lines of social
endeavor, and both believed in American expansion.

Before these tendencies had worked themselves out, three new forces
entered. In the sudden extension of our boundaries to the Pacific Coast,
which took place in the forties, the nation won so vast a domain that
its resources seemed illimitable and its society seemed able to throw
off all its maladies by the very presence of these vast new spaces. At
the same period the great activity of railroad building to the
Mississippi Valley occurred, making these lands available and diverting
attention to the task of economic con