h national tendencies.[29:1] On the tide of the
Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled into a nation.
Interstate migration went steadily on--a process of cross-fertilization
of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle of the sections over
slavery on the western frontier does not diminish the truth of this
statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that
would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. It was
the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: "I believe this Government
can not endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all
of one thing or all of the other." Nothing works for nationalism like
intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to
localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling
population. The effect reached back from the frontier and affected
profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World.

But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion
of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is
productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the
wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family.
The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and
particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a
representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article,[30:1]
has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies
are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution,
where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all
effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the
difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the
confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted
democracy.

The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a
century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions,
and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States
whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise
became essential. It was _western_ New York that forced an extension of
suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 1821; and it
was _western_ Virginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a
more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and
to give to the frontier region a more nearly pro