of complicated
and civilized society a rich but virgin wilderness. This task was one
which united a desirable social purpose with a profitable individual
interest. The country was undeveloped, and its inhabitants were poor.
They were to enrich themselves by the development of the country, and
the two different aspects of their task were scarcely distinguished.
They felt themselves authorized by social necessity to pursue their own
interests energetically and unscrupulously, and they were not either
hampered or helped in so doing by the interference of the local or the
national authorities. While the only people the pioneer was obliged to
consult were his neighbors, all his surroundings tended to make his
neighbors like himself--to bind them together by common interests,
feelings, and ideas. These surroundings called for practical, able,
flexible, alert, energetic, and resolute men, and men of a different
type had no opportunity of coming to the surface. The successful pioneer
Democrat was not a pleasant type in many respects, but he was saved from
many of the worst aspects of his limited experience and ideas by a
certain innocence, generosity, and kindliness of spirit. With all his
willful aggressiveness he was a companionable person who meant much
better towards his fellows than he himself knew.

We need to guard scrupulously against the under-valuation of the advance
which the pioneers made towards a genuine social democracy. The freedom
of intercourse and the consistency of feeling which they succeeded in
attaining is an indispensable characteristic of a democratic society.
The unity of such a state must lie deeper than any bond established by
obedience to a single political authority, or by the acceptance of
common precedents and ideas. It must be based in some measure upon an
instinctive familiarity of association, upon a quick communicability of
sympathy, upon the easy and effortless sense of companionship. Such
familiar intercourse is impossible, not only in a society with
aristocratic institutions, but it can with difficulty be attained in a
society that has once had aristocratic institutions. A century more or
less of political democracy has not introduced it into France, and in
1830 it did not exist along the Atlantic seaboard at all to the same
extent that it did in the newer states of the West. In those states the
people, in a sense, really lived together. They were divided by fewer
barriers than have been a