The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness.

When the Promise of American life is conceived as a national ideal, whose fulfillment is a matter of artful and laborious work, the effect thereof is substantially to identify the national purpose with the social problem.

Unless the great majority of Americans not only have, but believe they have, a fair chance, the better American future will be dangerously compromised.

The essential nature of a democracy compels it to insist that individual power of all kinds, political, economic, or intellectual, shall not be perversely and irresponsibly exercised.

Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved.

Democracy may mean something more than a theoretically absolute popular government, but it assuredly cannot mean anything less.

Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American mind with free political institutions.