In those states the
people, in a sense, really lived together. They were divided by fewer
barriers than have been any 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.
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