An incredible passage

From the current book I'm reading, The Great Frontier, by Walter Prescott Webb.

When these first men, many of them smarting under the man-made restraints of economics and religion, came to America they indeed and in truth entered a new world.  It is with difficulty that I find language to express its newness to the children of civilization.  In driving across the vast expanses of America I have often tried to visualize it as it was in this beginning, not the beginning of America, but the beginning of the European's experience with it.  Even at the distance of four hundred years, more or less, I find myself caught up with the combined emotions of wonder, amazement, and awe.  Here were new forests, new soil, and new streams; here was new silence and immensity, too silent and extensive to be broken by a single individual or by any number then available.  How small man feels in such presence.  But with this consciousness of insignificance goes that of elation which comes why man feels himself blended with nature where his vision is unobstructed and his acts unimpeded by other men.  What men had done to him all his life now fell away in a single instant: nowhere was there policeman, priest, or overlord to push him around.  All the barricades that men had placed around him came down, and he stepped forth freer of man than he or any of his fellows had been for a very long time.  Then and there he took a long step toward democracy, not political democracy but psychological, social, and economic liberty without which political democracy cannot long endure.  Though the European walls had fallen away, new ones rose around him, for he stood in the presence of a new master.  That master was nature, the forests and plains, the streams and deserts, the wind and the weather.  It is doubtful if man should be asked to change from one master to another with such contrasting temperaments.  Civilization shouts, gives orders, writes rules, puts man in institutions, and intimidates him with a thousand irritating directives.  In return it offers him protection, soul salvation, and a living if he can find it.  Nature looks down on him and broods in silence.  It never shouts, writes rules or builds prisons, and it makes no suggestion about destiny or the future.  Its noises of running streams and wind in the trees are its own, not directed at but soothing to him because he heard them before he heard the noises of civilization.  Nature makes no promises, writes no insurance, and cares not for the soul.  It is passive, receiving whatever is given to it, never striking back for vengeance or justice.  Thus frontier man became the only active agent on the scene, and his acts were unrestrained by other men.  In Europe, the theme of life was man against man, man against civilization; but on the frontier the theme was man against nature.