e stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had
at first small interest in town life or a share in markets. They were
passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which
assumed that under free conditions in the midst of unlimited resources,
the homogeneous society of the pioneers _must_ result in equality. What
they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon
the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own
career without fear or favor. What they instinctively opposed was the
crystallization of differences, the monopolization of opportunity and
the fixing of that monopoly by government or by social customs. The road
must be open. The game must be played according to the rules. There must
be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity, no closed doors to
the able, no stopping the free game before it was played to the end.
More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real
feeling, that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able
to achieve preeminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down
upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter
of pride and to the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the
less successful.

If this democracy of Southern pioneers, this Jacksonian democracy, was,
as its socialist critics have called it, in reality a democracy of
"expectant capitalists," it was not one which expected or acknowledged
on the part of the successful ones the right to harden their triumphs
into the rule of a privileged class. In short, if it is indeed true that
the backwoods democracy was based upon equality of opportunity, it is
also true that it resented the conception that opportunity under
competition should result in the hopeless inequality, or rule of class.
Ever a new clearing must be possible. And because the wilderness seemed
so unending, the menace to the enjoyment of this ideal seemed rather to
be feared from government, within or without, than from the operations
of internal evolution.

From the first, it became evident that these men had means of
supplementing their individual activity by informal combinations. One of
the things that impressed all early travelers in the United States was
the capacity for extra-legal, voluntary association.[343:1] This was
natural enough; in all America we can study the process by which in a
new land social customs form and