stand
against it. They wore a uniform which for the last two hundred years has
been better known than any other wherever the pioneers of civilization
tread the world's waste spaces or fight their way to the overlordship of
barbarous empires; a uniform known to the southern and the northern
hemispheres, the eastern and the western continents, and all the islands
of the sea. Subalterns wearing this uniform have fronted dangers and
responsibilities such as in most other services only gray-headed
generals are called upon to face; and, at the head of handfuls of
troops, have won for the British crown realms as large, and often as
populous, as European kingdoms. The scarlet-clad officers who serve the
monarchy of Great Britain have conquered many a barbarous people in all
the ends of the earth, and hold for their sovereign the lands of Moslem
and Hindoo, of Tartar and Arab and Pathan, of Malay, Negro, and
Polynesian. In many a war they have overcome every European rival
against whom they have been pitted. Again and again they have marched to
victory against Frenchman and Spaniard through the sweltering heat of
the tropics; and now, from the stupendous mountain masses of mid Asia,
they look northward through the wintry air, ready to bar the advance of
the legions of the Czar. Hitherto they have never gone back save once;
they have failed only when they sought to stop the westward march of a
mighty nation, a nation kin to theirs, a nation of their own tongue and
law, and mainly of their own blood.

The Frontiersmen and the British.

The British officers and the American border leaders found themselves
face to face in the wilderness as rivals of one another. Sundered by
interest and ambition, by education and the habits of thought,
trained to widely different ways of looking at life, and with the
memories of the hostile past fresh in their minds, they were in no humor
to do justice to one another. Each side regarded the other with jealousy
and dislike, and often with bitter hatred. Each often unwisely scorned
the other. Each kept green in mind the wrongs suffered at the other's
hands, and remembered every discreditable fact in the other's recent
history--every failure, every act of cruelty or stupidity, every deed
that could be held as the consequence of the worst moral and mental
shortcomings. Neither could appreciate the other's many and real
virtues. The policies for which they warred were hostile and
irreconcilable; th