PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY 185 



colonists of new wilderness areas beyond the first spheres of settle- 

 ment; to deal again with the primitive peoples at their borders; in 

 short, continuously to develop, almost under the actual observation 

 of the present day, those social and industrial stages which, in the 

 Old World, lie remote from the historian and can only be faintly 

 understood by scanty records. * The factor of time in American history 

 is insignificant when compared with the factors of space and social 

 evolution. Loria has insisted that colonial society exhibits in social 

 development material comparable in the study of society to that 

 brought into view for the geologist's inspection by the upheavals 

 of the earth's crust. These have elevated deep-lying strata of geolog- 

 ical formations, so that it is possible from them to read the earlier 

 pages of the history of the earth. But the idea is incompletely stated 

 in this form, for the whole period of American history exhibits 

 recurrences of the colonial society, modified by different frontier 

 physiographic conditions, and by the character and intensity of 

 industrial life of the society that throws off these new colonies. The 

 process is still going on in those northern areas of prairies and 

 plains in Canada, where we may pass, by railroad, from the youthful 

 but highly organized manufacturing cities of the more densely 

 peopled and still developing regions, through regions of increasingly 

 scanty and primitive agricultural occupation, out to the waste of 

 foothills, where the trail of the buffalo seams the hillside, reaching 

 to the far horizon line and showing the road which civilization will 

 rapidly follow. It may frankly be conceded that the differences 

 between the processes of social construction in Europe and in 

 America are at least as important as the resemblances and analogies. 

 But after all limitations are made, it remains true that the history 

 of America offers a rich new field for the scientific study of social 

 development, taken in the largest sense of the phrase. 



The point which I wish to make, therefore, is that it is important 

 to conceive of American history, first of all, as peculiarly rich in 

 problems arising from the study of the evolution of society. Henry 

 Adams has stated the matter in a somewhat less inclusive form in 

 these words: "The scientific interest of American history centred 

 in national character, and in the workings of a society destined to 

 become vast, in which individuals were important chiefly as types. 

 Although this kind of interest was different from that of European 

 history, it was at least as important to the world. Should history 

 ever become a true science, it must expect to establish its laws, not 

 from the complicated story of rival European nationalities, but 

 from the methodical evolution of a great democracy. North America 



1 Discussed by the writer under the title, " Significance of the Frontier in Amer- 

 ican History," in the Fifth Y ear-Book of the National Herbart Society, and in Re- 

 port of American Historical Association, 1893, p. 197. 



