e end.
Self-reliance, that most vital characteristic of the pioneer, was his by
blood and birth and training; and developed through the privations of
his lot and the genius that was in him to the mighty strength needed to
guide our great country through the titanic struggle of the Civil War.

The sense of equality was his, also by virtue of his pioneer training--a
consciousness fostered by life from childhood to manhood in a state of
society where there were neither rich to envy nor poor to despise, where
the gifts and hardships of the forest were distributed impartially to
each, and where men stood indeed equal before the forces of unsubdued
nature.

The same great forces taught liberality, modesty, charity, sympathy--in
a word, neighborliness. In that hard life, far removed from the
artificial aids and comforts of civilization, where all the wealth of
Croesus, had a man possessed it, would not have sufficed to purchase
relief from danger, or help in time of need, neighborliness became of
prime importance. A good neighbor doubled his safety and his resources,
a group of good neighbors increased his comfort and his prospects in a
ratio that grew like the cube root. Here was opportunity to practise
that virtue that Christ declared to be next to the love of God--the
fruitful injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself."

Here, too, in communities far from the customary restraints of organized
law, the common native intelligence of the pioneer was brought face to
face with primary and practical questions of natural right. These men
not only understood but appreciated the American doctrine of
self-government. It was this understanding, this feeling, which taught
Lincoln to write: "When the white man governs himself, that is
self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another
man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism"; and its
philosophic corollary: "He who would be no slave must consent to have no
slave."

Abraham Lincoln sprang from exceptional conditions--was in truth, in
the language of Lowell, a "new birth of our new soil." But this
distinction was not due alone to mere environment. The ordinary man,
with ordinary natural gifts, found in Western pioneer communities a
development essentially the same as he would have found under colonial
Virginia or Puritan New England: a commonplace life, varying only with
the changing ideas and customs of time and locality. But for the man
with ex