and the gambling dens of the Pacific Coast. Scenes of violence and carnage, the noise of fire-arms, and the bleaching bones of men, mark the advance. The voice of the backwoods-preacher sounds through the tumult in accents of mingled ecstasy and rebuke. But from this tempestuous cauldron of human passion and privation, a new character, earnest, restless, exuberant, self-confident, emerged; here an Andrew Jackson, there an Abraham Lincoln, flamed across the stage; and into this noble heritage of achievement and suffering, the entire nation, purified and united in its search for the Frontier, both of its occupation and its manhood, has proudly entered.
Now let us turn to the other side of the world, where on a widely different arena, but amid kindred travail, the British Empire may be seen shaping the British character, while the British character is still building the British Empire. There, too, on the manifold Frontiers of dominion, now amid the gaunt highlands of the Indian border, or the eternal snows of the Himalayas, now on the parched sands of Persia or Arabia, now in the equatorial swamps and forests of Africa, in an incessant struggle with nature and man, has been found a corresponding discipline for the men of our stock. Outside of the English Universities no school of character exists to compare with the Frontier; and character is there moulded, not by attrition with fellow men in the arts or studies of peace, but in the furnace of responsibility and on the anvil of self-reliance. Along many a thousand miles of remote border are to be found our twentieth-century Marcher Lords. The breath of the Frontier has entered into their nostrils and infused their being. Courage and conciliation—for unless they
