ect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to
suppress as an evil the command and blessing of Providence,
"Increase and multiply." Such would be the happy result of an
endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which
God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.

But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit the
advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater
Virginia[34:1] and South Carolina[34:2] gerrymandered those colonies to
insure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington
desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest; Jefferson would
reserve from settlement the territory of his Louisiana Purchase north of
the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in
exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. "When we shall
be full on this side," he writes, "we may lay off a range of States on
the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range,
advancing compactly as we multiply." Madison went so far as to argue to
the French minister that the United States had no interest in seeing
population extend itself on the right bank of the Mississippi, but
should rather fear it. When the Oregon question was under debate, in
1824, Smyth, of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits
of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of States beyond
the Mississippi, complaining that 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."[35:1] 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.

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