Graaf-Reinet, a frontier settlement of
that time, revolted against the Dutch South African Company and set up a
miniature republic.[389]

[Sidenote: The spirit of colonial frontiers.]

The spirit of the colonial frontier is the spirit of freedom, the spirit
of men who have traveled far, who are surcharged with energy, enterprise
and self-reliance, often with impatience of restraint. A severe process
of elimination culls out for the frontier a population strikingly
differentiated from the citizens of the old inhabited centers. Then
remoteness of location and abundance of opportunity proceed to emphasize
the qualities which have squeezed through the sieve of natural and
social selection. This is the type bred upon our own frontier, which,
West beyond West, has crossed the continent from the backwoods of the
Allegheny Mountains to the Pacific. The Siberian frontier develops much
the same type on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire. Here army
officers find a compensation for their rough surrounding in the escape
from the excessive bureaucracy of the capitals. Here is to be noted the
independence, self-reliance and self-respect characteristic of other
colonial frontiers. The Russian of the Asiatic border is proud to call
himself a Siberian: he is already differentiated in his own
consciousness. The force of Moscow tradition and discipline is faint
when it reaches him, it has traveled so far. Even the elaborate
observances of the orthodox Greek Church tend to become simplified on
the frontier. The question naturally arises whether in the Russian
Empire, as in the United States, the political periphery will in time,
react upon the center, infuse it with the spirit of progress and
youth.[390]

[Sidenote: Free border states as political survivals.]

When to a border situation is added a geographic location affording
conditions of long-established isolation, this tendency to maintain
political autonomy becomes very pronounced. This is the explanation of
so many frontier mountain states that have retained complete or partial
independence, such as Nepal, Bhutan, the Asturias, which successfully
withstood Saracen attack, and Montenegro, which has repelled alike
Venetian, Servian, and Turkish dominion. Europe especially has numerous
examples of these unabsorbed border states, whose independence
represents the equilibrium of the conflicting political attractions
about them. But all these smallest fragments of political territor