crystallize into law. We can even see
how the personal leader becomes the governmental official. This power of
the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common end without the
intervention of governmental institutions was one of their marked
characteristics. The log rolling, the house-raising, the husking bee,
the apple paring, and the squatters' associations whereby they protected
themselves against the speculators in securing title to their clearings
on the public domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp, the vigilantes,
the cattle-raisers' associations, the "gentlemen's agreements," are a
few of the indications of this attitude. It is well to emphasize this
American trait, because in a modified way it has come to be one of the
most characteristic and important features of the United States of
to-day. America does through informal association and understandings on
the part of the people many of the things which in the Old World are and
can be done only by governmental intervention and compulsion. These
associations were in America not due to immemorial custom of tribe or
village community. They were extemporized by voluntary action.

The actions of these associations had an authority akin to that of law.
They were usually not so much evidences of a disrespect for law and
order as the only means by which real law and order were possible in a
region where settlement and society had gone in advance of the
institutions and instrumentalities of organized society.

Because of these elements of individualistic competition and the power
of spontaneous association, pioneers were responsive to leadership. The
backwoodsmen knew that under the free opportunities of his life the
abler man would reveal himself, and show them the way. By free choice
and not by compulsion, by spontaneous impulse, and not by the domination
of a caste, they rallied around a cause, they supported an issue. They
yielded to the principle of government by agreement, and they hated the
doctrine of autocracy even before it gained a name.

They looked forward to the extension of their American principles to the
Old World and their keenest apprehensions came from the possibility of
the extension of the Old World's system of arbitrary rule, its class
wars and rivalries and interventions to the destruction of the free
States and democratic institutions which they were building in the
forests of America.

If we add to these aspects of early backwoods