What in fact has been the course of American history?  How is it to be distinguished from European history?  What features has it of its own, which give it its distinctive plan and movement?  We have suffered, it is to be feared, a very serious limitation of view until recent years by having all our history written in the East.  It has smacked strongly of a local flavor.  It has concerned itself too exclusively with the origins and Old-World derivations of our story.  Our historians have made their march from the sea with their heads over shoulder, their gaze always backward upon the landing-places and homes of the first settlers.  In spite of the steady immigration, with its persistent tide of foreign blood, they have chosen to speak often and to think always of our people as sprung after all from a common stock, bearing a family likeness in every branch, and following all the while old, familiar, family ways.  The view is the more misleading because it is so large a part of the truth without being all of it.  The common British stock did first make the country, and has always set the pace.  There were common institutions up and down the coast; and these had formed and hardened for a persistent growth before the great westward migration began which was to re-shape and modify every element of our life.  The national government itself was set up and made strong by success while yet we lingered for the most part upon the eastern coast and feared a too distant frontier.

But, the beginnings once safely made, change set in apace.  Not only so:  there had been slow change from the first.  We have no frontier now, we are told,—­except a broken fragment, it may be, here and there in some barren corner of the western lands, where some inhospitable mountain still shoulders us out, or where men are still lacking to break the baked surface of the plains and occupy them in the very teeth of hostile nature.  But at first it was all frontier,—­a mere strip of settlements stretched precariously upon the sea-edge of the wilds:  an untouched continent in front of them, and behind them an unfrequented sea that almost never showed so much as the momentary gleam of a sail.  Every step in the slow process of settlement was but a step of the same kind as the first, an advance to a new frontier like the old.  For long we lacked, it is true, that new breed of frontiersmen born in after years beyond the mountains.  Those first frontiersmen had still a touch of the timidity of the Old World in their blood:  they lacked the frontier heart.  They were “Pilgrims” in very fact,—­exiled, not at home.  Fine courage they had:  and a steadfastness in their bold design which it does a faint-hearted age good to look back upon.  There was no thought of drawing back.  Steadily, almost calmly, they extended their seats.  They built homes, and deemed it certain their children would live there after them.  But they did not love the rough, uneasy life for its own sake.  How long did they keep, if they could,