Of course there was a deep change wrought, if not in these men, at any rate in their children; and every generation saw the change deepen.  It must seem to every thoughtful man a notable thing how, while the change was wrought, the simples of things complex were revealed in the clear air of the New World:  how all accidentals seemed to fall away from the structure of government, and the simple first principles were laid bare that abide always; how social distinctions were stripped off, shown to be the mere cloaks and masks they were, and every man brought once again to a clear realization of his actual relations to his fellows!  It was as if trained and sophisticated men had been rid of a sudden of their sophistication and of all the theory of their life, and left with nothing but their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered instinct.  And the fact that we kept always, for close upon three hundred years, a like element in our life, a frontier people always in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history.  “East” and “West,” an ever-changing line, but an unvarying experience and a constant leaven of change working always within the body of our folk.  Our political, our economic, our social life has felt this potent influence from the wild border all our history through.  The “West” is the great word of our history.  The “Westerner” has been the type and master of our American life.  Now at length, as I have said, we have lost our frontier; our front lies almost unbroken along all the great coast line of the western sea.  The Westerner, in some day soon to come, will pass out of our life, as he so long ago passed out of the life of the Old World.  Then a new epoch will open for us.  Perhaps it has opened already.  Slowly we shall grow old, compact our people, study the delicate adjustments of an intricate society, and ponder the niceties, as we have hitherto pondered the bulks and structural framework, of government.  Have we not, indeed, already come to these things?  But the past we know.  We can “see it steady and see it whole”; and its central movement and motive are gross and obvious to the eye.

Till the first century of the Constitution is rounded out we stand all the while in the presence of that stupendous westward movement which has filled the continent:  so vast, so various, at times so tragical, so swept by passion.  Through all the long time there has been a line of rude settlements along our front wherein the same tests of power and of institutions were still being made that were made first upon the sloping banks of the rivers of old Virginia and within the long sweep of the Bay of Massachusetts.  The new life of the West has reacted all the while—­who shall say how powerfully?—­upon the older life of the East; and yet the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward to it through every decade of the long process the chosen impulses and suggestions of history.  The West has taken strength, thought,