e ownership of land was not as widespread because the farmers had not yet made good their titles to the lands that they had engrossed. Taken as a whole the people of the Northwest were economically self-sufficient. They could not be subjected to economic coercion and, hence, they were politically free. Their support of free government-as they understood it-was effective.
             The northeastern section of the United States had already assumed its modem outlines of a capitalistic-industrial society where the means of production were either owned or controlled by relatively few. That is to say, New England and the middle states were fast becoming in essence a plutocracy whose political ideology was still strongly democratic; but the application of this democratic ideology was being seriously hampered by the economic dependence of the middle and lower classes upon those who owned the tools of production. The employee unprotected by government supervision or by strong labor organizations was subject in exercising his political rights to the undue infl
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