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These frontier men were the precise opposites of the tidewater aristocrats. Back of them, in the great surge that had taken people over the Alleghenies and into the opening Western country, there was a deep, implicit dissatisfaction with a past that had settled into grooves. They stood for democracy, not from any reasoned conclusion about the proper ordering of human society, but simply because they had grown up in the middle of democracy and knew how it worked. Their society might have privileges, but they would be privileges each man had won for himself. Forms and patterns meant nothing. No man was born to anything, except perhaps to a chance to show how far he could rise. Life was competition.
這些來自邊疆的人與生活在沿海低洼地區的貴族們截然相反。在他們身后，一股激流已經把人們從阿勒格尼山脈帶到了開放的西部疆土，這些人意識中潛藏著一種對墨守成規的過去的深深不滿。他們支持民主，并非源于對人類社會合理秩序的理性思考得出的結論，而是因為他們成長于民主環境下，了解民主是如何運作的。他們的社會中也許有特權，但他們要獲得這些必須自己去爭取。現有的規矩和模式對他們來說一文不值。也許除了一個能夠展示個人潛力的機會，人生來就一無所有。生活就是競爭。
Yet along with this feeling had come a deep sense of belonging to a national community. The Westerner who developed a farm, opened a shop or set up in business as a trader, could hope to prosper only as his own community prospered—and his community ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada down to Mexico. If the land was settled, with towns and highways and accessible markets, he could better himself.
但是與這種思想同時存在的是一種對國家的深深的歸屬感。那些開墾農場、經營商店，甚至成立公司經商的西部人，只有在國家繁榮昌盛的條件下才可能興旺發達。他們的國家從大西洋擴展到太平洋，從加拿大延伸到墨西哥。如果人們在這片土地上定居，建立城鎮、高速公路和開放的市場，他們能獲得更大的成功。
