phenomenon on the frontier of that day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of states. Thus each one of the periods of paper-money projects coincides with periods when a new set of frontier communities had arisen, and coincides in area with these successive frontiers, for the most part. The recent radical Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a state that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the state. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest importance.

ATTEMPTS TO CHECK AND REGULATE THE FRONTIER

The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities would have checked settlement at the head waters of the Atlantic tributaries and allowed the "savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade should decrease." This called out Burke's splendid protest:

If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with their habits of life; they would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counselors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and

in no long time must, be the attempt to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and blessing of Providence, 66 increase and multi

ply." Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.

But the English government was not alone in its desire to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tide-water Virginia1 and South Carolina 2 gerrymandered those colonies to insure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington desired to settle a state at a time in the Northwest. In the constitutional convention of 1787 Gouverneur Morris declared that the western country would not be able to furnish men equally enlightened to share in the administration of our common interests. The busy haunts of men, not the remote wilderness, was the proper school of political talents. "If the western people get power into their hands, they will ruin the Atlantic interest. The back members are always most averse to the best measures." He desired, therefore, to fix such a rule of congressional representation that the Atlantic States could always outvote the Western. Jefferson would reserve from settlement the territory of his Louisiana purchase north of the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. "When we shall be full on this side," he writes, "we may lay off a range of states on the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range, advancing compactly as we' multiply." Madison went so far as to argue to the French minister that the United States had no interest in seeing population extend itself on the right bank of the Mississippi, but should rather fear it. When the Oregon question was under debate, in 1824, Smyth, of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of states beyond the Mississippi, complaining that

1 Debates in the Virginia Constitutional Convention, 1829-1830.

2 Calhoun, Works, I, 401-406.

3 Elliot's Debates, V, 298. Cf. Josiah Quincy's outburst in the House of Representatives on the admission of Louisiana, January 14, 1811. See Johnston, American Orations, I, 145.

the seaboard states were being drained of the flower of their population by the bringing of too much land into market. Even Thomas Benton, the man of widest views of the destiny of the West, at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge of the Rocky mountains "the western limits of the republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down." But the attempts to limit the boundaries, to restrict land sales and settlement, and to deprive the West of its share of political power were all in vain. Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World.

RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION

The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier came through its educational and religious activity, exerted by interstate migration and by organized societies. Speaking, in 1835, Dr. Lyman Beecher declared: "It is equally plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West," and he pointed out that the population of the West "is assembled from all the states of the Union and from all the nations of Europe, and is rushing in like the waters of the flood, demanding for its moral preservation the immediate and universal action of those institutions which discipline the mind and arm the conscience and the heart. And so various are the opinions and habits, and so recent and imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse are the settlements of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in their utmost perfection and power. A nation is being born in a day.' . . . But what will become of the West if her prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of power, while those great institutions linger which are necessary to form the mind and the conscience and the

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1 Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, I, 721.

heart of that vast world? It must not be permitted.

Let no man in the East quiet himself and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the West. . . . Her destiny is our destiny."

With the appeal to the conscience of New England, he adds appeals to her fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The New England preacher and the school-teacher left their mark on the West. The dread of western emancipation from New England's political and económic control was paralleled by her fears lest the West cut loose from her religion. Commenting, in 1850, on reports that settlement was rapidly extending northward in Wisconsin, the editor of the Home Missionary writes: "We scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our settlements. While we sympathize in whatever tends to increase the physical resources and prosperity of our country, we cannot forget that with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter corners of the land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and less." Acting in accordance with such ideas, home missions were established and western colleges were erected. As seaboard cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore strove for the mastery of western trade, so the various denominations strove for the possession of the West. Thus an intellectual stream from New England sources fertilized the West. Other sections sent their missionaries; but the real struggle was between sects. The contest for power and the expansive tendency furnished to the various sects by the existence of a moving frontier had important results on the character of religious organization in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The effects of western freedom and newness in pro- \ ducing religious isms is noteworthy. Illustrations of this tendency may be seen in the development of the Millerites, Spiritualists, and Mormons of western New York in its frontier days. In general the religious aspects of the frontier deserved study.

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INTELLECTUAL TRAITS

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic, but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and, withal, that buoyancy and exuberance which come with freedom, - these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. We are not easily aware of the deep influence of this individualistic way of thinking upon our present conditions. It persists in the midst of a society that has passed away from the conditions that occasioned it. It makes it difficult to secure social regulation of business enterprises that are essentially public; it is a stumbling-block in the way of civil-service reform; it permeates our doctrines of education; 2 but with the passing of the free lands a vast extension of the social tendency may be expected in America.

Ratzel, the well-known geographer, has pointed out the fact that for centuries the great unoccupied area of America furnished to the American spirit something of its own largeness. It has given a largeness of design and an optimism to American

1 Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them. Cf. Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, p. 98, and Adams, History of the United States, I, 60; IX, 240, 241. The transition appears to become marked at the close of the War of 1812, a period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the West was noted for restless energy. Grund, Americans, II, i.

2 See the able paper by Professor De Garmo on "Social Aspects of Moral Education," in the Third Yearbook of the National Herbart Society, 1897, p. 37.