评论
打印
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.
这些来自边疆的人与生活在沿海低洼地区的贵族们截然相反。在他们身后，一股激流已经把人们从阿勒格尼山脉带到了开放的西部疆土，这些人意识中潜藏着一种对墨守成规的过去的深深不满。他们支持民主，并非源于对人类社会合理秩序的理性思考得出的结论，而是因为他们成长于民主环境下，了解民主是如何运作的。他们的社会中也许有特权，但他们要获得这些必须自己去争取。现有的规矩和模式对他们来说一文不值。也许除了一个能够展示个人潜力的机会，人生来就一无所有。生活就是竞争。
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.
但是与这种思想同时存在的是一种对国家的深深的归属感。那些开垦农场、经营商店，甚至成立公司经商的西部人，只有在国家繁荣昌盛的条件下才可能兴旺发达。他们的国家从大西洋扩展到太平洋，从加拿大延伸到墨西哥。如果人们在这片土地上定居，建立城镇、高速公路和开放的市场，他们能获得更大的成功。
