Japan, stirred out of
her insular complacence by the threat of Muscovite encroachment. Germany
and Italy, each strengthened and enlarged as to national outlook by
recent political unification, have elbowed their way into the crowded
colonial field. The French, though not expansionists as individuals,
have an excellent capacity for collective action when directed by
government. The officials whom Louis XIV sent to Canada in the
seventeenth century executed large schemes of empire reflecting the
dilation of French frontiers in Europe. These ideals of expansion seem
to have been communicated by the power of example, or the threat of
danger in them, to the English colonists in Virginia and Pennsylvania,
and later to Washington and Jefferson.

[Sidenote: The mind of colonials.]

The best type of colonial expansion is found among the English-speaking
people of America, Australia and South Africa. Their spacial ideas are
built on a big scale. Distances do not daunt them. The man who could
conceive a Cape-to-Cairo railroad, with all the schemes of territorial
aggrandizement therein implied, had a mind that took continents for its
units of measure; and he found a fitting monument in a province of
imperial proportions whereon was inscribed his name. Bryce tells us that
in South Africa the social circle of "the best people" includes
Pretoria, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Cape Town--a social
circle with a diameter of a thousand miles![323]

The spirit of our western frontier, so long as there was a frontier, was
the spirit of movement, of the conquest of space. It found its
expression in the history of the Wilderness Road and the Oregon Trail.
When the center of population in the United States still lingered on the
shore of Chesapeake Bay, and the frontier of continuous settlement had
not advanced beyond the present western boundary of Virginia and
Pennsylvania, the spacious mind of Thomas Jefferson foresaw the
Mississippi Valley as the inevitable and necessary possession of the
American people, and looked upon the trade of the far-off Columbia River
as a natural feeder of the Mississippi commerce.[324]

Emerson's statement that the vast size of the United States is reflected
in the big views of its people applies not only to political policy,
which in the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in history has embraced
a hemisphere; nor is it confined to the big scale of their economic
processes. Emerson had in mind rat