om the standard which highly
civilized nations have reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they
bring the new land up towards the level of the old, they themselves
partly revert to their ancestral conditions; they sink back towards the
state of their ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers can see
beyond this temporary retrogression into the future for which it is a
preparation. There is small cause for wonder in the fact that so many of
the leaders of Eastern thought looked with coldness upon the effort of
the Westerners to push north of the Ohio.

The Westerners Solved the Problem.

Yet it was these Western frontiersmen who were the real and vital
factors in the solution of the problems which so annoyed the British
Monarchy and the American Republic. They eagerly craved the Indian
lands; they would not be denied entrance to the thinly-peopled territory
wherein they intended to make homes for themselves and their children.
Rough, masterful, lawless, they were neither daunted by the prowess of
the red warriors whose wrath they braved, nor awed by the displeasure of
the Government whose solemn engagements they violated. The enormous
extent of the frontier dividing the white settler from the savage, and
the tangled inaccessibility of the country in which it everywhere lay,
rendered it as difficult for the national authorities to control the
frontiersmen as it was to chastise the Indians.

Why the East backed the West.

If the separation of interests between the thickly settled East and the
sparsely settled West had been complete it may be that the East would
have refused outright to support the West, in which case the advance
would have been very slow and halting. But the separation was not
complete. The frontiersmen were numerically important in some of the
States, as in Virginia, Georgia, and even Pennsylvania and New York; and
under a democratic system of government this meant that these States
were more or less responsive to their demands. It was greatly to the
interest of the frontiersmen that their demands should be gratified,
while other citizens had no very concrete concern in the matter one way
or the other. In addition to this, and even more important, was the fact
that there were large classes of the population everywhere who felt much
sense of identity with the frontiersmen, and sympathized with them. The
fathers or grandfathers of these peoples had themselves been
frontiersmen, and they