west of the Missouri
river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years
in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among
the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything
whatever of this Western empire. We had bought this vast region and were
paying for it before we knew what we had purchased. The wise men of the
East, leading men in Congress, said that it would be criminal to add
this territory to our already huge domain, because it could never be
settled. It was not dreamed that civilization would ever really subdue
it. Even much later, men as able as Daniel Webster deplored the attempt
to extend our lines farther to the West, saying that these territories
could not be States, that the East would suffer if we widened our West,
and that the latter could never be of value to the union! So far as this
great West was concerned, it was spurned and held in contempt, and it
had full right to take itself as an outcast. Decreed to the wilderness
forever, it could have been forgiven for running wild. Denominated as
unfit for the occupation of the Eastern population, it might have been
expected that it would gather to itself a population all its own.

It did gather such a population, and in part that population was a
lawless one. The frontier, clear across to the Pacific, has at one time
or another been lawless; but this was not always the fault of the men
who occupied the frontier. The latter swept Westward with such
unexampled swiftness that the machinery of the law could not always keep
up with them. Where there are no courts, where each man is judge and
jury for himself, protecting himself and his property by his own arm
alone, there always have gathered also the lawless, those who do not
wish the day of law to come, men who want license and not liberty, who
wish crime and not lawfulness, who want to take what is not theirs and
to enforce their own will in their own fashion.

"There are two states of society perhaps equally bad for the promotion
of good morals and virtue--the densely populated city and the
wilderness. In the former, a single individual loses his identity in the
mass, and, being unnoticed, is without the view of the public, and can,
to a certain extent, commit crimes with impunity. In the latter, the
population is sparse and, the strong arm of the law not being extended,
his crimes are in a measure unobserved, or, if so, frequently power is
wanti