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."1 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

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 economic 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 producing 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.

1

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.

thought.1 Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open, but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the everretreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

1 See paper on "The West as a Field for Historical Study," in Report of American Historical Association for 1896, pp. 279–319.

2 The commentary upon this sentence- written in 1893 lies in the recent history of Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, and the Isthmian canal.

CHAPTER III

THE GROWTH OF CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES1

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Of late years there have been many able discussions of the problems of city government in the United States. Most of these discussions, however, have turned upon the forms of municipal governments and the dangers discernible in their workings the existence and growth of cities have been assumed as a matter of course. Nevertheless, the fact that we have so many cities to govern is one of the most astonishing in history. A little more than a hundred years ago the whole population of the United States was under four millions, of whom hardly a hundred thousand lived in cities. There were in 1890 four hundred and forty-seven cities, with a total population of more than eighteen millions. Since 1790, the population of the United States has increased nearly sixteen times, while the cities have increased in number more than seventy times, and the urban population nearly a hundred and forty times.

In the causes and development of this phenomenal growth may perhaps be found an explanation of some of the complicated problems of city government. This paper will therefore be devoted to three inquiries:

1. What causes have determined the sites and distribution of American cities? 2. What has been the growth of their population? 3. What is noticeable about the status and social condition of people in cities? 3

1"The Rise of American Cities," by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Reprinted from Hart's Practical Essays on American Government, p. 162, et seq., by permission of the author and the publishers, Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., New York and London.

2 In 1900 there were 545 cities containing 24,992,000 inhabitants, or 33.1 per cent of the total population. — ED.

3 In this volume only the discussion relating to the first inquiry is reproduced. - ED.