ny similarly numerous body of people in the
history of the world; and it was this characteristic which made them so
efficient and so easily directed by their natural leaders. No doubt it
would be neither possible nor desirable to reproduce a precisely similar
consistency of feeling over a social area in which there was a greater
diversity of manners, standards, and occupations; but it remains true
that the American democracy will lose its most valuable and promising
characteristic in case it loses the homogeneity of feeling which the
pioneers were the first to embody.
It is equally important to remember, however, that the social
consistency of the pioneer communities should under different conditions
undergo a radical transformation. Neither the pioneers themselves nor
their admirers and their critics have sufficiently understood how much
individual independence was sacrificed in order to obtain this
consistency of feeling, or how completely it was the product, in the
form it assumed, of temporary economic conditions. If we study the
Western Democrats as a body of men who, on the whole, responded
admirably to the conditions and opportunities of their time, but who
were also very much victimized and impoverished by the limited nature of
these conditions and opportunities--if we study the Western Democrat
from that point of view, we shall find him to be the most significant
economic and social type in American history. On the other hand, if we
regard him in the way that he and his subsequent prototypes wish to be
regarded, as the example of all that is permanently excellent and
formative in American democracy, he will be, not only entirely
misunderstood, but transformed from an edifying into a mischievous type.
Their peculiar social homogeneity, and their conviction that one man was
as good as another, was the natural and legitimate product of
contemporary economic conditions. The average man, without any special
bent or qualifications, was in the pioneer states the useful man. In
that country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which
demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or
exclusive devotion. The cheaply and easily made instrument was the
efficient instrument, because it was adapted to a year or two of use and
then for supersession by a better instrument; and for the service of
such tools one man was as likely to be good as another. No special
equipment was required. The farme
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