s well as the
promotion of great individual fortunes. The nation centered its
interests in the development of the West. It is only in our own day that
this humanitarian democratic wave has reached the level of those earlier
years. But in the meantime there are clear evidences of the persistence
of the forces, even though under strange guise. Read the platforms of
the Greenback-Labor, the Granger, and the Populist parties, and you will
find in those platforms, discredited and reprobated by the major parties
of the time, the basic proposals of the Democratic party after its
revolution under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, and of the Republican
party after its revolution by Mr. Roosevelt. The Insurgent movement is
so clearly related to the areas and elements that gave strength to this
progressive assertion of old democratic ideals with new weapons, that it
must be regarded as the organized refusal of these persistent
tendencies to be checked by the advocates of more moderate measures.

I have dealt with these fragments of party history, not, of course, with
the purpose of expressing any present judgment upon them, but to
emphasize and give concreteness to the fact that there is disclosed by
present events a new significance to these contests of radical democracy
and conservative interests; that they are rather a continuing expression
of deep-seated forces than fragmentary and sporadic curios for the
historical museum.

If we should survey the history of our lands from a similar point of
view, considering the relations of legislation and administration of the
public domain to the structure of American democracy, it would yield a
return far beyond that offered by the formal treatment of the subject in
most of our histories. We should find in the squatter doctrines and
practices, the seizure of the best soils, the taking of public timber on
the theory of a right to it by the labor expended on it, fruitful
material for understanding the atmosphere and ideals under which the
great corporations developed the West. Men like Senator Benton and
Delegate Sibley in successive generations defended the trespasses of the
pioneer and the lumberman upon the public forest lands, and denounced
the paternal government that "harassed" these men, who were engaged in
what we should call stealing government timber. It is evident that at
some time between the middle of the nineteenth century and the present
time, when we impose jail sentences upon