Only by a study of local history can we hope really to understand the
development of human society. The historian like the scientist must
base his knowledge on what can be seen through a microscope.
Wisconsin, from the time of its formation as a state, has realized
this, and has steadily confirmed itself in the opinion. This
institution, which it founded in the days of its youth and scant
resources, it has supported with a liberality, public and private,
growing as its wealth has grown. Of late years, a corps of local
societies, city and county, have been forming about the central
institution. The University has directed its students to the study of
the localities from which they have come, and stores in its stacks the
facts which they glean. No one of the newer states of the country
knows itself so well as Wisconsin, and if, as is so often the case,
acquired knowledge seems merely to reveal the knowledge still
necessary for real understanding, we have carefully developed plans to
extend it still more widely and intensively.
Yet how insignificant any locality seems today, when practically all
are plunged into the same calamity, when the resources of all are
concentrated in one struggle. Races and breeds, nationalities and
castes are merged together on the same battle-field. Their
similarities of plight and object dominate their differences, the
protective barriers each erected to preserve that distinctiveness so
dear to human nature seem leveled, and history has become world
history. Men thrown thus physically into the maelstrom find themselves
intellectually also torn from their safe anchorages and adrift they
know not where. What does the individual count for, what the locality,
what the past? What counts it to study the development of Rock County
cheese-making, when its cheeses and cheese makers are tumbled
promiscuously with those of all counties and nations, simply as units
in a staggering sum total?
The world has changed, but that is not startling. The world is always
changing. This change is greater, and for us in America more sudden
and dramatic, than any which preceded, but everything has not changed.
The relation of the past to the present and the future is permanent.
The relations of the individual, the locality, and the whole, shift,
but they are the permanent factors of which life consists. The world
war has not changed these factors, but it should bring us up sharply
to a realization of what they really mean. Socrates’ dictum “know
thyself” was not given in any selfish spirit. He did not mean that we
were to devote ourselves to ourselves, but that we could know
ourselves more thoroughly than we could know others, that
self-knowledge was the completest knowledge, and therefore the
Archimedian lever to open up knowledge of others. Self-examination has
often become an obsession excluding all else, the study of local
history has often become antiquarianism. The real reason for the
cultivating of both is the formation of known bases from which to
calculate. The German historian, Lamprecht, became so familiar with
the little city of Trêves that he could have conversed intimately with
its inhabitants of any year during the Middle Ages if he might have
been dropped into it, but this devotion was not for the sake of
Trêves, it gave the understanding knowledge necessary for his great
work on German civilization as a whole. We can know no generation
unless we have delved deep into the souls of its greatest men, but
such biographical studies are not for themselves alone, but to
contribute to a sympathetic comprehension of their contemporaries.
Local history to justify itself must be as exact and absolute as
studies dealing with human nature may be, but if no effort is made to
utilize it for an understanding of national and world history, it has
missed its mission. Local history is not an end in itself. Moreover,
if it is written without a wide knowledge of outside conditions,
conditions in other localities, and other times, it will be but a
warped product, as useless to the community for which it is written as
for the outside world. Such selfishness and egoism have never been
profitable. The only difference today is that for the moment at least
they have become impossible.
The most striking feature in the history of Wisconsin has been the
transformation within a lifetime of a virgin forest into a civilized
area, the drawing together of the sons and daughters of many widely
differing localities and their welding into a commonwealth. This
conquest of the frontier has been but a portion of that vast movement
which in a period historically short has created the United States,
and more particularly it has been an important and typical battle in
the campaign for the Mississippi Valley, which has resulted in our
sister states of the Middle West.
Different as has been the history of each, the history of the frontier
movement is a whole; the study of any state contributes to an
understanding of all. As the occupation of Wisconsin has been but a
part of the American frontier movement, so that has not been unique,
even in the nineteenth century. We have liked to think of ourselves as
carrying on a special and distinct task; to its difficulties and
inspiration we have attributed many of our virtues, and on them we
have laid the burden of our defects. The task, however, has not been
unique. The results have, indeed, had their distinctive differences,
but these have come rather from the way the task has been performed
than because we have had a different thing to do. We know our own
frontier with scientific thoroughness, but we cannot understand it
unless we contrast it with such other frontiers as Australia, Siberia,
South America, and Africa.
One of the essential features of a frontier is that both labor and
capital come from without, and much of the capital is contributed by
people who do not come to the frontier. Exception must, indeed, be
made to this statement. The Spaniards found labor in Peru and Mexico,
and they found also capital, as did the miners of Australia and
California, the lumber barons of Wisconsin, and the fur traders of
Canada. In none of these instances, however, did either the local
labor or local capital suffice, and in all the instances to be cited
later the bulk of the labor came from away, and the owners of an
important portion of the capital remained away; the frontier
community, therefore, was a debtor community, and the debt was due to
an outside community.
This common condition has in all cases had an important bearing not
only on economic development, but on the whole texture of the social
fabric which was created; it affected not only the frontier itself,
but its reflex influence on the sections from which the labor and
capital were drawn set at work influences which at times became
leading factors in their existence. So important have their influences
been, that where the study is confined to any one frontier, they seem
to dominate development, and make history their creature. When we
extend our study, however, we find that in spite of the fundamental
resemblance, each has followed its separate course; that the different
balance of other factors, and even such secondary considerations as
laws and constitutions, have radically altered the actual operation of
these powerful natural resemblances. The control of the frontier’s
natural resources, the distribution of proceeds, the very content of
politics have varied with every frontier. The problem has been one,
the methods and results have been as varied as the fields in which it
occurred.
In the United States the larger part of the capital came from or
through another section of the same country. That is, the East
furnished nearly all that was supplied, although to do so it had to
borrow somewhat from Europe. The direct loans from Europe to the West
were comparatively unimportant. Consequently the interests of the
debtor and creditor sections conflicted in the arena of national
politics. Two unique features made the working out of the problem
different in this country from any other. The first was the division
of the country into a large number of states, sovereign within a
restricted range of powers, some controlled by the debtor element,
some by the creditor. The other was that at one time, and that the
most critical, the frontier was strong enough at least to veto the
action of the national government.
The result of these conditions was a struggle unusually complex. The
control of banking, of the currency, of natural resources, such as
lands, minerals, and oil, and of transportation or, as it is phrased
in our politics, internal improvements, were the bone of contention.
The desire to have these controlled by national or state governments
varied with the political situation. The frontier wished banks that
would not be too particular, a currency that would be easy to get; it
wished, and wishes, control of its own systems of transportation and
its natural resources.
The sections furnishing the supplies were more interested in the
capital to which strings were tied, than in the labor which cut its
apron strings on leaving home. The struggle antedated the Revolution;
the high points in its later history were the Shays Rebellion, the
Jackson régime, the greenback movement, the Bryan campaign, and it
finds present expression in the opposition in the Far West to the
national conservation policy.
When the frontier secured the reins of power in the sinewy hands of
Andrew Jackson, it was not in a position to impose its policy upon the
nation, but it was powerful enough to wrest banking, the currency, and
internal improvements from the control of the national government, and
turn them over to the states. The frontier states, elate, started on a
mad career of making their own internal improvements, by means of
borrowed capital diluted by paper issues, till money ran like fairy
gold into the pockets of the needy. For one golden moment the problem
of the frontier seemed solved to the satisfaction of the frontier.
Jackson himself caused the first crash. Unable to tell good paper from
bad, he could at any rate tell paper from gold, and in the Specie
Circular of 1836 he brought credit to the touchstone of real value and
sent the house of cards toppling. Feverishly rebuilt within the next
few years, it fell again in 1841, carrying with it the whole dream of
its builders. So severe was the blow that numbers of the states took
advantage of their sovereign rights, and repudiated a portion of their
debts. Securely entrenched behind their sovereign inviolability to
legal attack, they still enjoyed the inviolability to force which
their position as part of a larger nation afforded. They snapped their
fingers at their creditors; but they could borrow no more. The nation
had left the task of national development to the states; the states,
by impairing their credit, had rendered themselves incapable of
handling it.
This situation left the field free for, in fact rendered necessary,
the intervention of individuals or of individuals organized as
corporations. The legal position of the latter had already been
prepared. The decisions of Justice Marshall had given corporation
charters an unusual degree of legal sanctity, which the state
constitutions modified rather than reversed. The fears of the
Jeffersonian democracy had incorporated into the national constitution
itself special restrictions upon the government in dealing with the
individual, which the decisions of the Supreme Court under Justice
Taney went far in applying to the corporations. Corporations became so
firmly entrenched in their position as the chief agency in national
development, that even when, after the Civil War, the national
government became more active and once more assumed control of banking
and the currency, and the credit of the states was reëstablished, both
agencies used their powers chiefly to assist corporations. When, in
the present generation, the necessity of public control became
obvious, it took the form, for the most part, of regulation of
corporations, rather than that of absorbing or supplanting them.
The direction of the development of transportation and the
exploitation of natural resources, therefore, was, for the most part,
in the hands of individuals, and, in the case of large projects, of
individuals organized as corporations, and, with the exception of farm
land, of individuals and corporations representing nonresident
capital. Many influences, of course, modified their activities, but
these affected rather the security of their capital than the
initiative of their plans. Many lost the capital which they poured
into the new region, and the result was that the prospect of large
returns was demanded by others before venturing; speculation, lost
investments, and abnormally productive investments characterized the
process as a whole. Politicians concerned themselves rather with the
means, the questions of banking and currency, than with the end, the
character of the development which should take place.
The other independent portions of the American continents, for the
most part, resembled the United States in organization, but the
distribution of the economic factors differed and produced different
results. Except in the United States, the capital which has been
necessary for the occupation of the wilderness has come, for the most
part, not from other portions of the same country, but from foreign
countries.
The most important of these frontiers during the nineteenth century
has been that of Argentina. Here the established section was until
recently comparatively unimportant, both labor and capital came in
large measure from abroad; the greater portion of the labor from
Italy, of the capital from Great Britain. The conflict between the
debtor and creditor sections, therefore, was not one of politics, but
of diplomacy. Argentina might have what system of banking and currency
it wished, but most creditors had to be paid in an international
standard of value. In a world state, doubtless, all the frontiers
would unite to further their interests, as the frontier states have in
the United States; in the world as at present unorganized the ultimate
appeal is to force. A debtor country, and one relatively weak as
compared with its creditor, Argentina has not been without its plans,
conceived like those of the American frontiersman without moral
dishonesty but with incapacity or unwillingness to think the thing
through, for easing its burden. In the efforts of Calvo and Drago to
incorporate into international law the principle that debts between
nations and their citizens may not be collected by force, we see as
surely the reflection of frontier views, as in the programs of
Greenbacker and of Populist. In the greater interest in international
affairs in Argentina than in the United States, we see a new
illustration of the aphorism “For where your treasure is, there will
your heart be also.”
In the long run, Argentina has had to pay up, and has had to pay also
in high interest rates, for the lack of a feeling of absolute security
on the part of the investor. Probably few countries have had more
expensive statesmen than Drago and Calvo.
To attract capital, moreover, it has been necessary to offer it
abundantly the undeveloped natural resources of the country. On the
other hand, the logic of the situation has kept development in the
hands of the nation to a greater degree than in the United States, for
the nation has been able to borrow money more cheaply than individuals
or domestic corporations, and public ownership has played an important
part in her upbuilding.
Argentina has paid, and so we have a situation which has never
culminated in a crisis. The republics of the Caribbean have not been
so fortunate. Much of the money has been borrowed, not for the
purposes of improvement, but to finance revolution and for personal
expenditure. Frittered away instead of put at productive work, it has
become an increasing burden, in many cases an unbearable burden, and
countries like Hayti, San Domingo, Honduras, and at times Mexico, have
become internationally bankrupt. Protected against legal action by
their sovereignty, the creditor and the debtor stood in a situation
where force alone could determine their relationship. What the result
would normally have been, is clearly enough indicated by the
intervention of France in Mexico in 1861, and of Germany in Venezuela
in 1902. The subjugation of the weak debtor by the strong creditor has
been prevented not by sovereignty, but by the interposition of a third
force, the United States inspired by the Monroe Doctrine.
While, however, the Monroe Doctrine served to maintain the appearance
of independence for the nations concerned, it produced an _impasse_ in
the development of the frontier. Capital did not have to go to
countries which could not be relied upon to pay up and which were
protected from foreclosure by an outside force. The United States
served the republics in somewhat the same manner that it did its own
repudiating states. It was, however, unable to do as much for them as
it did for its own. The wayward republics found themselves debarred
from directing their own development as did our states in the critical
forties, and there was no domestic capital to undertake the task. The
capital willing to engage in work under such circumstances was that of
the most speculative sort. Some gamblers staked their money on
presidential contenders, seeking to gain control of the government.
Others, more powerful and trusting in their power, offered to embark
huge sums on condition of receiving stupendous grants of the natural
resources and practical control of the whole development to be made in
certain regions. Such was the much-discussed Morgan syndicate proposal
to Honduras, and that of the English Pearson syndicate to Columbia. In
the latter instance, the United States again intervened, fearing the
influence of such aggregations of foreign capital, and expressed its
opinion that such special concessions violated the spirit of the
Monroe Doctrine and could not be allowed.
From the tightening deadlock thus produced, Diaz extricated Mexico for
a time, but it lapsed, and the others showed no signs of the power to
emerge. Such European capital as had been loaned felt not unjustly
angry, such as was for hire sought other avenues and frontiers less
peculiarly hedged in. The situation shouted for action, and action
could come only from the United States, which would not permit simple
logic to work its own conclusion. It was under such circumstances that
President Roosevelt assumed the financial administration of San
Domingo and inaugurated a policy which has been followed and extended
by his successors. Justice, or approximate justice, has been done
between debtor and creditor, but the active development of these
frontiers is still halted for lack of a machinery for the future.
In striking contrast with these American frontiers has been that of
Siberia. Here has taken place one of the greatest frontier advances of
history, here the same localization of creditor and debtor has
existed, yet the conflict of classes and sections has led neither to
politics as in the United States, nor to diplomacy as in Latin
America. Much of the capital has been provided by France, but the
money has, for the most part, been borrowed by the national Russian
government, representing a strong nation and an essential ally. The
security of the creditor has rested in the good faith, not of the
frontier but of an established society, which has wished constantly
more and more money and has realized that an atmosphere of credit must
be preserved.
As the frontier has had nothing to say concerning its credit
relationships, so it has been equally powerless in controlling the
expenditures of the money borrowed and the disposition of its natural
resources. The sole check upon the absolute will of the central
government has been the desire to attract labor to the frontier. Few
laborers, as few capitalists, seek the wild for the mere adventure of
subduing it. The bids and rival bids for settlers by those controlling
various sections of the world-frontier for the last three centuries
have been to a large extent the basis for those more liberal
institutions which have developed on the fringe of society. Their bids
have been determined by the character of the settlers they desired or
found available, and have in considerable measure determined the
character of the communities built up. Force has played its part as
well as lure, and has given incurious Africa a share in the
development of the Americas that the most psychological advertiser
would never have secured for it. In the nineteenth century, Russia has
had more command of force to populate her waste spaces than any other
country. Consequently the actual frontiersmen have had less to say
about the development of their own region than elsewhere. Yet it is
easily possible to exaggerate the coercive power of the central
government, in popular estimation it is probably exaggerated; and the
plans for the settlement of Siberia have been to no small degree
influenced by consideration for the ideals of the typical Russian and
the incentives which would coerce him to move his hearthstone. Yet on
the whole, simplicity and the carrying out of preconceived plans have
worked the opening of this great frontier. That the great release
which has just occurred in Russia will reveal where these plans have
bound, and that the politics of the new republic will be colored by
frontier problems, is inevitable.
Australia and New Zealand have, to an even greater extent than the
American frontier, secured their labor and capital from another
section of the same empire. The relations between the sections,
however, are quite different. The local organization of the debtor
communities resembles that of the American states; in fact, the scope
of their power is much broader, but they do not possess that
inviolability to legal attack which sovereignty gives, and have not
been represented in the central government. Credit, therefore, has
been a matter of neither politics nor diplomacy, but has been as
firmly controlled by the lending section, England, as that of Siberia
has been by Russia. Judicial unity, which has been the only organic
bond of empire, makes the sovereign, like the Crown, identical in
Brisbane and in London. There is no chance of reducing debts save by a
separation, which other considerations have rendered furthest from the
wishes of the debtors.
General diplomacy also has been largely excluded from local
consideration. The creditor-debtor relationship was almost exclusively
one within the empire, and the handling of other diplomatic questions
was in the hands of the British government in which the frontier
sections were represented only by influence. The attempts to arouse an
imperial, not to say international, mind found hard sledging during
the real development period, and only partially succeeded just before
the Great War.
On the other hand, the locality has been absolute master of the
expenditure of its borrowings. No subordinate communities in the
world, most decidedly not the states of our Union, have been left so
entirely free to control their development, not only to plan their
transportation and allot their natural resources, but even to regulate
their tariffs. It is not surprising that these governments, with
credit carefully maintained by outside and unquestionable forces,
found their politics in the working out of such development, and that,
in large measure, borrowing has been done by the local governments,
which have themselves spent the money borrowed. There can be no better
security than that of a government incapacitated from repudiation.
Creditors have lost comparatively little money to these frontiers, and
so Australia and New Zealand have received their needed capital upon
better terms, perhaps, than any of the other regions treated. How
wisely they have spent it, is a matter of the most violent dispute.
Politics in communities barred from the great questions of credit and
diplomacy yet organized on the basis of the broadest democracy and
local autonomy, have naturally had their strikingly significant
characteristics. Everyone knows how rich their statute books have been
in laws relating to the distribution of natural resources and of all
kinds of wealth, and to conditions of living. Everyone knows the sharp
antagonism between labor, in the narrower sense of wage earner, and
employers. That these frontiers have been experiment grounds in social
legislation has not been due to their being frontier communities but
because they have been frontier communities freed from some of the
most characteristic frontier problems.
Rhodesia resembles Australia and New Zealand in local autonomy and
lack of representation in the national government. In other respects,
however, it is widely different. Here capital came first, and labor
afterward. The capital, moreover, was not of the timid sort seeking
small return and security, such as invested in the securities of New
Zealand, Victoria, and New South Wales, nor did it entirely resemble
that of the United States during the development period, which sought
returns both large and immediate. The capitalists of Rhodesia could
wait, in fact, are still waiting. Alone among the frontiers, Rhodesia
has not been under the strain of seeking to make returns on its
invested capital before development has reached the stage where
returns can properly be expected. It may well hope to be freed from
those complications of individual indebtedness, which have filled our
courts with business, and strewn our advance with such tragedies as
are even today occurring in northern Wisconsin.
Upon the capitalists thus far-sighted and enduring rested the full
burden of development. The region was autonomous in its relation to
the British Empire, but its non-resident creditors mapped out its
future, not its settlers as in Australia. Capital under such
circumstances looks for large rewards, and in this case expects to
secure them by control of the natural resources, when these have been
made available by the incoming of settlers. Youngest of the frontiers,
the working of the old factors in this new relationship remains a
question. One would expect economy and efficiency in planning, but
possible conflicts between the resident community and its creditors
over the division of the proceeds. The settlers that it seeks are of
the most independent type, men not with energy alone, but with some
small capital of their own. It offers them not only economic
opportunity but also political privileges. How such a population will
react under a system which restricts politics one degree more than
they are restricted in Australia, by excluding the larger lines of
local development such as transportation, is one of the interesting
questions of tomorrow. One might look for some clue in the history of
the American colonial proprietorships, but how far the intelligent
study of those experiments will have enabled the proprietors of
Rhodesia to avoid their mistakes, and how far the changed conditions
created by two centuries of the most rapid change the world has seen,
will modify the interworking of similar forces, no one can tell.
In organization, Canada is today, of course, like Australia, but
whereas the commonwealth of Australia is but recent and was formed
only after the scaffolding of development had been created, the
Dominion of Canada was created in season to direct the most active
period of frontiering. During the most significant period, therefore,
Canada has had an organization that resembled our federal states. The
resemblance, however, is partly superficial; in Canada the specified
powers belong to the provinces, the undefined powers to the Dominion.
Neither provinces nor Dominion, moreover, have possessed the legal
inviolability of absolute sovereignty. The credit of all has been
protected by the judicial unity of the empire, and the stability of
the currency has not been a subject for politics. Diplomacy, also, has
belonged to the mother country, although the proximity of the United
States has not allowed it to be the blank it was so long in its
Australian sister-colonies.
Economically the development of the Canadian frontier has more
resembled that of the United States, for the capital required has come
most largely from or through other sections of the same colony. As
compared with the United States, however, development has been, until
quite lately, slow. Consequently those regions which have passed
beyond the frontier stage have continuously controlled the central
government. There has been no parallel to the Jackson régime. Credit,
therefore, has been doubly guarded, by the majority in Canada, and by
Canada’s position within the British Empire. With the credit of the
Dominion and of the provinces intact, there have been no intrinsic
obstacles to the development of transportation and the control of
resources by the public, and public works have played an important
part. At the same time the period of greatest need coincided with the
high tide of the individualistic movement in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The principles of John Stuart Mill, of Cobbett and Bright, of
Gladstone, Carlyle, and Emerson, dominated a generation devoted to the
task of breaking down time-worn systems of social control and
releasing the individual. The period of new regulations dictated by
rising democracy had not swung in. Therefore, a very considerable
portion of the task was left to private corporations, to whom were
granted very considerable proportions of the natural resources.
Corporation control and public enterprise, therefore, combined with
unusual harmony in developing and exploiting a frontier which was,
indeed, represented, but which could control in neither a positive nor
a negative sense.
The recent and sudden expansion of the Canadian frontier in the west
and northwest has created a new balance. The situation in Canada today
resembles that in the United States when the advance of population
from the Alleghanies to beyond the Mississippi gave the frontier an
unusual political weight, and elected Andrew Jackson. This region is
just now in the position where it is so eager to get capital that it
is ready to agree to almost any terms to secure its railroads and farm
machinery. When pay time comes, its sentiments will change. It is
difficult to see how it can upset credit, but that, in combination
with the democracy of the older portions of Canada, it will make its
voice felt and play a part in Canadian politics that the frontier has
never played in the long course of Canadian history, no student of
frontiers can doubt.
On the whole, Canada has secured its capital at low interest rates,
lower probably than any other frontier except Australia and New
Zealand. It has, however, sacrificed the control of its natural
resources to a considerable degree. The direction of its development
has attracted both public attention and the labor of its strongest men
controlling private capital. In none of the frontiers have the two
systems been so equally blended.
Most hapless of the frontiers is that of Manchuria. It is at present a
represented province of an imperial republic, which furnishes most of
the labor required, but can furnish neither capital nor protection.
Its capital comes, for the most part, from two rival foreign powers,
who are not really creditor nations, but who are so eager to invest in
Manchuria that they borrow from still other countries for the purpose.
The local community has no more to say in regard to its development or
the partition of its resources than Siberia. It does not, indeed, rest
under any such obligation of paying as does Australia, for power
rather than money return is sought by Russia and Japan, who furnish it
with money on their own security and, therefore, at reasonably low
rates. Undoubtedly, however, the successful grasp of power will mean
such a hold on natural resources as will give those countries, in
return for their guarantee, rewards which will be more satisfactory to
them than to the actual conquerors of the Manchurian wilds. It will be
interesting to see whether sectional interests will unite the Russian
and Japanese settlers with the Chinese majority against the foreign
capitalists, or whether racial antagonism will prove stronger than
economic. Countless cross currents already chop the surface, and
conditions point rather to a problem than a state.
Wide as is the field covered by the frontiers discussed, the
Mississippi Valley, Argentina, the wilds encircling the Caribbean,
Siberia, Australia, Canada, and Manchuria, it covers barely half the
area where since the year 1800 European civilization has been
struggling to establish itself by the occupation of regions wholly or
partly vacant. Different as have been the conditions classified under
which the simple underlying factors universally involved have
operated, more have been left undescribed. Algiers has had a frontier
incorporated as an integral part of France, a centralized republic. In
fact, practically every region of Africa has presented a frontier, and
the handling of frontier conditions by English, French, and Belgians,
Boers, Germans, Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards, and American negroes.
The greatest frontier area today is Brazil, and every country of Latin
America has a frontier and its own slightly varying organization and
balance of forces, while the British, French, and Dutch are all
severally trying their hand on the particular problem of a tropical
American frontier. Some portions of India, Persia, Arabia, Indo-China,
China, Korea, the Philippines, Formosa, and many South Sea Islands,
present the problem under special guises. Sweden, Norway, Russia,
Canada, and the United States are all dealing with the possibility of
pressing civilization into the fastnesses of the Arctic.
When one considers the extent of the world frontier in process of
occupation during the last century, the persuasive effect of its call
upon the older world for labor and capital, the coloring of the whole
world by the natural resources it has unearthed and the institutions
it has developed, its conquest can hardly be considered as second in
influence to any factor of the time. Naturally it is not intended to
present here even a basis for its study. The fundamental factors and
the different systems can be accurately enough described in general
terms, but the differences in their operation are less precise than
has been indicated; private corporations exist in Siberia, state
public improvements in the United States. Many of the similarities
produced everywhere by frontier conditions have been neglected. The
attempt has been merely to indicate some of the tendencies fostered by
different types of control. The differences between the various
frontiers, resulting from race and geography, which in many cases
explain the different types of organization or modify their working,
have been left untouched. The problem is immense, its study is one for
generations. Yet some things he who runs may read. Even a partial
acquaintance with the main features of all cannot but render the work
of each statesman and historian more effective in his own particular
task.
Some things will be understood only when no frontier, as we know it,
exists. Yet even while we are in the current, we have accumulated some
material, and it would seem to be contributory negligence not to use
it. It must be patent that one must be honest or must pay for it. Can
we not secure some rough idea of which system of approach has resulted
in the greater justice between the creditor and debtor section, and
what is justice? Has community control of its development or creditor
control been most economical and most effective? Has exploitation to
produce local capital any justification? What system has called to the
task the greater proportion of ability? Would the United States have
fared better under a system by which Webster, Clay, and Calhoun would
have devoted to moulding the transportation system the genius they
spent in bolstering up public credit? Which system has been the most
responsive to the needs of the situation, and which has stimulated the
greatest amount of public virtue, and which has been most easily
manipulated for selfish advantage?
I haven’t the slightest intention of answering these questions here; I
freely admit that many of them leave me perplexed, but I dogmatically
maintain that it is by pondering such questions, by studying the
comparisons they suggest, that the frontier problem is to be
understood by the historian and comprehended by the statesman. Without
such comparisons the student of the problem in any one field is less
apt to judge a particular episode rightly than a man with no knowledge
and good intentions. The path to wisdom and sure-footed action must be
founded on the rock of exact knowledge, but it must be platted on a
wide-spread survey.
All life reveals the irony of wisdom attained only by the experience
to deal with which it was needed. It is but today we have this rich
storehouse of experimental frontier building, and tomorrow we will
have no frontier. It might seem that we could let a dead past bury its
dead, that the study of frontier episodes, however successful, has
become sheer antiquarianism. Such a view, however, minimizes the world
frontier that remains and the time and effort that will be required in
its conquest. As in science, so with the material world, the
nineteenth century made easy sweeping advances; it left much that was
difficult for the slower and more laborious labors of the twentieth.
It overlooks the facts that great masses of the world’s inhabitants
today count the experience of meeting the wild first-hand among the
most important of their nearby inheritances, that the frontier set its
mark upon them or their parents, or grandparents, and that the present
generation cannot be understood unless the frontier is understood.
Still more important is the consideration that in many instances the
frontier merely localizes problems that are general. The factors with
which this paper has dealt are peculiar to the frontier only in that
the creditors are assembled in one section, the debtors in another.
This is an important peculiarity in large part because it isolates the
characteristics of each, and makes them easier of study. When the
world has been fully occupied, new frontiers will appear, are already
appearing. Natural resources now undreamed of will need capital and
labor for their exploitation, will be susceptible of development in
more than one way, and will raise problems of control. Our experiences
with the rude and simple problem of the first occupation of a waste
area will seem as geometry to calculus compared with those raised by
these new frontiers, but will be as essential to a wise handling of
them as geometry is to calculus.
But the instances that we have reviewed seem to carry a simpler and
more immediate moral. When we see in the United States people of all
nations laboring for the conquest of the Mississippi Valley, and
employing money saved by New England and the Middle States or borrowed
by them from Europe, when we see Russia borrowing French money to make
Siberia habitable for Russian peasants, when Japan borrows in England,
and Russia in France to pay Chinese to develop transportation in
Manchuria, when Argentina borrows English money to employ Italians in
the pampas, and Transvaal gold passes through English banks to build
Rhodesian railways, we get glimpses of a new world. Not that these
things are absolutely novel, but that in variety and extent they are
unparalleled, and these experiences on the frontiers but bring into
clearer view general tendencies of the time. The German invasion of
Belgium uncovered for most of us the tens of thousands of Russians
working in the Liege factories, the hundreds of thousands of Russians
working on German farms, of Italians on the Rhine, of Spaniards in
France; the war itself has hastened the movement with its vast
importations of Indo-Chinese and Arabs into France, with its
tight-woven mesh of international credit. The frontier still reveals
most clearly how in the nineteenth century the business of life became
international and how poorly devised was the world organization for
coping with it.
Again, the experience of the frontier in the nineteenth century
exhibits one step in the process of readjustment. Can one review the
instances which have been noted, without feeling the theory of
absolute sovereignty crumbling beneath his feet? The United States has
in practice divided the sovereignty, and as a result surrendered the
actual control to corporations they themselves created. The British
Empire preserved unity in theory, but actually divided it still more
effectually. What can a practical man make of the sovereignty of
Honduras, where the native government cannot control its own
development, the British Empire cannot protect its citizens’ money,
and the United States can veto the actions of both but cannot take
positive action; or of Manchuria, which is an integral portion of a
sovereign republic, but which is actually as to one-half controlled by
Russia and the other by Japan, both of whom are somewhat curtailed in
their actions by promises to the United States. However one may cling
to the legal theory of the absolute and indivisible character of
sovereignty in independent localities, a study of the world frontier
brings out the fact that no localities are independent in fact, or
absolutely sovereign. The inter-growth of the world, which the
development of the world frontier has so much facilitated, has already
weakened the bulwarks of local independence; let us hope that with its
international character the frontier may facilitate the integration of
a world organization better adapted to the conditions of today, such
an organization as tomorrow will be a necessity.
[82] Delivered as the annual address before the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin October 25, 1917.