ABSTRACT
The conquest of the wide-stretching continent lying to the west of the Appalachians, gave to American development a tendency adverse from the evolution of a socialized democracy. It made America atomic. It led automatically to a loose political coherence and to a structureless economic system. The trust, the hundred-millionaire, and the slum were latent in the land which the American people in their first century of freedom were to subjugate. Land, sea and sky, forest and prairie, offered seemingly exhaust-less supplies to the scattered millions of early Americans. Had the early Americans been engaged in manufacturing, commerce, and intensive agriculture, there would have been little apparent incentive to a westward migration. Farming, in America, even according to the then European standards, was superficial and ineffectual. An ineffectual national production and a rapidly increasing population forced increasing numbers of Americans across the mountains.
