Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after his will." Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present. Kipling's "Song of the English" has given it expression:-- "We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town; We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down. Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need, Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead. As the deer breaks--as the steer breaks--from the herd where they graze, In the faith of little children we went on our ways. Then the wood failed--then the food failed--then the last water dried-- In the faith of little children we lay down and died. "On the sand-drift--on the veldt-side--in the fern-scrub we lay, That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way. Follow after--follow after! We have watered the root And the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit! Follow after--we are waiting by the trails that we lost For the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host. "Follow after--follow after--for the harvest is sown: By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!" This was the vision that called to Roger Williams,--that "prophetic soul ravished of truth disembodied," "unable to enter into treaty with its environment," and forced to seek the wilderness. "Oh, how sweet," wrote William Penn, from his forest refuge, "is the quiet of these parts, freed from the troubles and perplexities of woeful Europe." And here he projected what he called his "Holy Experiment in Government."