COUNTRY LIFE IN THE WEST 33 



But the most important effect of the frontier has been in 

 the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been 

 indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Com- 

 plex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of 

 primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is 

 anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly 

 to any direct control. The taxgatherer is viewed as the rep- 

 resentative of oppression. Professor Osgood, in an able article, 

 has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the 

 colonies are important factors in the explanation of the Ameri- 

 can Revolution, where individual liberty was somewhat confused 

 with the absence of all effective government. The same con- 

 ditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong 

 government in the period of the Confederacy. The frontier in- 

 dividualism has from the beginning promoted democracy. 



So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency 

 exists, and economic power secures political power. But the 

 democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individual- 

 ism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and 

 pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its 

 dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has 

 allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has 

 rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils 

 that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. 



The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier 

 came through its educational and religious activity, exerted by 

 interstate migration and by organized societies. The New Eng- 

 land preacher and the school-teacher left their marks on the 

 West. The dread of western emancipation from New England's 

 political and economic control was paralleled by her fears lest 

 the West cut loose from her religion. Commenting, in 1850, on 

 reports that settlement was rapidly extending northward in 

 Wisconsin, the editor of the Home Missionary writes: "We 

 scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension 

 of our settlements. While we sympathize in whatever tends to 

 increase the physical resources and prosperity of our country, 

 we cannot forget that with all these dispersions into remote and 

 still remoter corners of the land the supply of the means of 

 grace is becoming relatively less and less." Acting in accord- 



