ld, lawless, ambitious leader among the frontier folk dreamed of
wresting from the Spaniard some portion of his rich and ill-guarded
domain.

Relations of the Frontiersmen to the Central Government.

It was not alone the attitude of the frontiersmen towards Spain that was
novel, and based upon a situation for which there was little precedent.
Their relations with one another, with their brethren of the seaboard,
and with the Federal Government, likewise had to be adjusted without
much chance of profiting by antecedent experience. Many phases of these
relations between the people who stayed at home, and those who wandered
off to make homes, between the frontiersmen as they formed young States,
and the Central Government representing the old States, were entirely
new, and were ill-understood by both parties. Truths which all citizens
have now grown to accept as axiomatic were then seen clearly only by the
very greatest men, and by most others were seen dimly, if at all. What
is now regarded as inevitable and proper was then held as something
abnormal, unnatural, and greatly to be dreaded. The men engaged in
building new commonwealths did not, as yet, understand that they owed
the Union as much as did the dwellers in the old States. They were apt
to let liberty become mere anarchy and license, to talk extravagantly
about their rights while ignoring their duties, and to rail at the
weakness of the Central Government while at the same time opposing with
foolish violence every effort to make it stronger. On the other hand,
the people of the long-settled country found difficulty in heartily
accepting the idea that the new communities, as they sprang up in the
forest, were entitled to stand exactly on a level with the old, not only
as regards their own rights, but as regards the right to shape the
destiny of the Union itself.

The Union still Inchoate.

The Union was as yet imperfect. The jangling colonies had been welded
together, after a fashion, in the slow fire of the Revolutionary war;
but the old lines of cleavage were still distinctly marked. The great
struggle had been of incalculable benefit to all Americans. Under its
stress they had begun to develop a national type of thought and
character. Americans now held in common memories which they shared with
no one else; for they held ever in mind the feats of a dozen crowded
years. Theirs was the history of all that had been done by the
Continental Congress and