Economic conditions bred a democratic society in the West. What Gallatin said of Pennsylvania was true of the greater West: "An equal distribution of property made every individual independent and produced a true and real equality." The basal characteristic of the West was individual ownership of land; and the reaction of the sense of proprietorship upon individual character was the most significant fact in the history of its population. Intense individualism and rugged self-reliance were the salient characteristics of the Westerner. So far as he reflected upon his social relations, he believed in complete social equality. In numberless instances the pioneer had migrated to escape the social inequalities and depressing conventions of older communities; and he was not minded to encourage the reproduction of these conditions in his new home. "America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon," wrote De Tocqueville in his notable study of American democracy. "Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance." Life on the frontier, where a man wrestled with the primitive forces of Nature and conquered by dint of his indomitable will, made the Westerner perhaps overconfident in his ability to deal with all obstacles in the way of human achievement and withal somewhat impatient under the restraints imposed by the more complicated social order in the older communities to the East. The sweep of the prairies and the wide horizon lines of the Middle West may have exercised a subtle influence upon temperament. At all events, the Westerner was buoyant and optimistic, taking large views of national destiny and of the possibilities of human achievement in a democracy. There was danger, indeed, that in cutting loose from the irritating restraints of the older communities, the people of the West would sacrifice much of the grace and many of the intellectual and spiritual refinements of an older civilization. "In this part of the American continent," observes De Tocqueville, "population has escaped the influence not only of great names and great wealth, but even of the natural aristocracy of knowledge and virtue." It seemed to two young New Englanders who traversed the vast region from the Western Reserve to New Orleans in 1813, in the interests of missionary societies, that the people were wrapped in spiritual darkness, "being ignorant, often vicious, and utterly destitute of Bibles and religious literature." The General Bible Society of the United States was founded in 1816 to dispel this irreligious gloom. Within five years this organization and its numerous auxiliaries had distributed one hundred and forty thousand Bibles and Testaments through the new States.