If now in the way of recapitulation we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:

Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and

1 This extract is taken from an article published in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1903, entitled "Contributions of the West to American Democracy.' The author has dealt with the same subject in a book entitled "The Rise of the New West," and in various pamphlets and magazine articles. He was formerly professor of American History in the University of Wisconsin and now holds that position in Harvard University.

Used by permission of the author and of the Atlantic Monthly Company.

equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of a highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. Upon the region of the Middle West alone could be set down all of the great countries of central Europe, - France, Germany, Italy, and Austro-Hungary, and there would still be a liberal margin. It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the world has a democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design and such grasp upon the means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little States with primitive economic conditions.

Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men, as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constitute the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater wellbeing among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after his will." Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its vast significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movement, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present. Kipling has given it expression:

We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need
Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.

As the deer breaks as the steer breaks from the herd where

they graze,

In the faith of little children we went on our ways.

In the faith of little children we lay down and died.

On the sand-drift on the veldt-side- in the fern-scrub we lay,
That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way.
Follow after follow after! We have watered the root
And the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit!
Follow after we are waiting by the trails that we lost
For the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host.
Follow after - follow after for the harvest is sown;
By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!

The idealistic influence is not limited to the dreamers' conception of a new State. It gave to the pioneer farmer and city builder a restless energy, a quick capacity for judgment and action, a belief in liberty, freedom of opportunity, and a resistance to the domination of class which infused a vitality and power into the individual atoms of this democratic mass. Even as he dwelt among the stumps of his newly cut clearing, the pioneer had the creative vision of a new order of society. In imagination he pushed back his forest boundary to the confines of a mighty Commonwealth; he willed that log cabins should become the lofty buildings of great cities. He decreed that his children should enter into a heritage of education, comfort, and social welfare, and for this ideal he bore the scars of the wilderness. Let us see to

it that the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin shall enlarge into the spiritual life of a democracy where civil power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement for the common good.

THE EXODUS FOR OREGON1

JOAQUIN MILLER (1841-1911)

A tale half told and hardly understood;

The talk of bearded men that chanced to meet,
That leaned on long quaint rifles in the wood,
That looked in fellow faces, spoke discreet
And low, as half in doubt and in defeat
Of hope; a tale it was of lands of gold
That lay below the sun. Wild-winged and fleet
It spread among the swift Missouri's bold

Unbridled men, and reached to where Ohio rolled.

Then long chained lines of yoked and patient steers:
Then long white trains that pointed to the west,
Beyond the savage west; the hopes and fears
Of blunt, untutored men, who hardly guessed
Their course; the brave and silent women, dressed
In homely spun attire, the boys in bands,

The cheery babes that laughed at all, and blessed
The doubting hearts, with laughing, lifted hands!
What exodus for far untraversed lands!

The Plains! The shouting drivers at the wheel;
The crash of leather whips; the crush and roll

1 Cincinnatus Heine Miller was born in Indiana, and in early boyhood emigrated with his parents to Oregon. The family was one of those which made the great migration across the Western plains in ox wagons, during the years following the gold discoveries in California in 1849, and the early life of Miller was spent upon the Pacific Coast. Soon after the appearance of a poem dealing with the career of Joaquin Murietta, a young Mexican bandit, the author was nicknamed Joaquin Miller, and most of his later work appeared under this name.

From Joaquin Miller's Poems (Bear Edition), Vol. II. Copyright, 1909, by C. H. Miller. Published by Harr Wagner Publishing Company, San Francisco. Used by permission of the publishers.