aneously with
the passing into private possession of the free public domain and the
natural resources of the United States. But American democracy was based
on an abundance of free lands; these were the very conditions that
shaped its growth and its fundamental traits. Thus time has revealed
that these two ideals of pioneer democracy had elements of mutual
hostility and contained the seeds of its dissolution. The present finds
itself engaged in the task of readjusting its old ideals to new
conditions and is turning increasingly to government to preserve its
traditional democracy. It is not surprising that socialism shows
noteworthy gains as elections continue; that parties are forming on new
lines; that the demand for primary elections, for popular choice of
senators, initiative, referendum, and recall, is spreading, and that the
regions once the center of pioneer democracy exhibit these tendencies in
the most marked degree. They are efforts to find substitutes for that
former safeguard of democracy, the disappearing free lands. They are the
sequence to the extinction of the frontier.

It is necessary next to notice that in the midst of all this national
energy, and contemporaneous with the tendency to turn to the national
government for protection to democracy, there is clear evidence of the
persistence and the development of sectionalism.[321:1] Whether we
observe the grouping of votes in Congress and in general elections, or
the organization and utterances of business leaders, or the association
of scholars, churches, or other representatives of the things of the
spirit, we find that American life is not only increasing in its
national intensity but that it is integrating by sections. In part this
is due to the factor of great spaces which make sectional rather than
national organization the line of least resistance; but, in part, it is
also the expression of the separate economic, political, and social
interests and the separate spiritual life of the various geographic
provinces or sections. The votes on the tariff, and in general the
location of the strongholds of the Progressive Republican movement,
illustrate this fact. The difficulty of a national adjustment of railway
rates to the diverse interests of different sections is another
example. Without attempting to enter upon a more extensive discussion of
sectionalism, I desire simply to point out that there are evidences that
now, as formerly, the separate geogra