:1] Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association for
1909-10. Reprinted with the permission of the Association.

[177:2] _Harper's Magazine_, February, 1900, p. 413.

[178:1] Roosevelt, "The Northwest in the Nation," in "Proceedings of the
Wisconsin Historical Society," Fortieth Annual Meeting, p. 92.

[182:1] "Franklin's Works," iv, p. 141.

[186:1] [See the author's paper in _American Historical Review_, x, p.
245.]

[187:1] Cutler's "Cutler," ii, p. 372.

[188:1] "Jefferson's Works," iv, p. 431.

[189:1] [See on the Cotton Kingdom, U. B. Phillips, "History of
Slavery"; W. G. Brown, "Lower South"; W. E. Dodd, "Expansion and
Conflict"; F. J. Turner, "New West."]

[198:1] "Congressional Globe," 35th Congress, First Session, Appendix,
p. 70.

[199:1] "Seward's Works" (Boston, 1884), iv, p. 319.

VII

THE PROBLEM OF THE WEST[205:1]

The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American
development. A glance at the map of the United States reveals the truth.
To write of a "Western sectionalism," bounded on the east by the
Alleghanies, is, in itself, to proclaim the writer a provincial. What is
the West? What has it been in American life? To have the answers to
these questions, is to understand the most significant features of the
United States of to-day.

The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. It is
the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the
application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming
influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is
suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom
is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and
new ideals, are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears, the
"West" proper passes on to a new frontier, and in the former area, a new
society has emerged from its contact with the backwoods. Gradually this
society loses its primitive conditions, and assimilates itself to the
type of the older social conditions of the East; but it bears within it
enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade
after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone
on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the East. The
history of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a history
of imitation, of simple borrowing; it is a history of the evolution and
ada