176 HISTORY OF AMERICA 



of the Greek colonial societies in Sicily and Italy: the pride in big 

 things; the fondness for the florid in literature, art, and oratory; the 

 absorption in material interests; the self-confidence and the boast- 

 fulness. 



The new conditions facing these English on the frontiers of their 

 settlements, in the conquest from nature of a home for civilized 

 man, compelled a readjustment of life to its surroundings, a simple 

 and elastic organization of society in which the earlier life of Europe 

 was lived over again. As time went on, the frontier was pushed 

 further out, and in the older settlements society became more com- 

 plex and conventional, approaching the stability of the mother coun- 

 try. The thought is a familiar one that on the frontier we have been 

 able to recover the conditions of colonial history, and in recovering 

 these conditions breathe again its atmosphere. America, then, has 

 offered the student the singular opportunity of observing successive 

 periods of historical and social development existing almost side by 

 side, so that one could lift the veil of the past by going west. This 

 thought, which has been so richly developed and illustrated by 

 Professor Turner, 1 was first fully realized, so far as I know, by that 

 acute Frenchman Talleyrand when sojourning in America. I shall 

 take the liberty to quote his observations, on the chance of con- 

 tributing to the history of one of the most fertile and instructive 

 contributions ever made to the interpretation of American history. 

 In his memoir on The Commercial Relations of the United States with 

 England, read before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 

 March 25, 1797, he says: 



" Let us look at these populous cities, full of Englishmen, Germans, 

 Irishmen, and Dutchmen, and also of the native inhabitants; these 

 remote hamlets, so far from one another; these vast untilled stretches 

 of country, traversed rather than lived in by men who have no settled 

 home; what common tie is there to bind together what is so unlike? 

 It is a novel sight for the traveler who, starting from a leading town 

 where the social order is matured and settled, passes over in succes- 

 sion all the stages of civilization and industry as they descend until 

 in a very few days he comes to the crude and shapeless cabin built 

 of freshly felled trees. Such a journey is a kind of practical analysis 

 and living demonstration of the growth of peoples and of states. One 

 starts from a highly complex total and reaches the simplest elements. 

 Day by day one after another of those inventions which our multiply- 

 ing wants have made necessary disappears, and one seems to be 

 traveling backward in the history of the progress of the human 

 mind." 2 



1 In his Significance of the Frontier in American History, State Historical Soci- 

 ety of Wisconsin, 1894, and other papers. 



2 Memoir e sur les relations commer 'dales des Etats-Unis arec I'Angleterre; Me- 



