ier of that
day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the
crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of
States. Thus each one of the periods of lax financial integrity
coincides with periods when a new set of frontier communities had
arisen, and coincides in area with these successive frontiers, for the
most part. The recent Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a
State that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists,
itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of
the State. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the
intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a
developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of
paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be
isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest
importance.[32:2]

The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the
frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities
would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic
tributaries and allowed the "savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet
lest the peltry trade should decrease." This called out Burke's splendid
protest:

If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The
people would occupy without grants. They have already so
occupied in many places. You can not station garrisons in
every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one
place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with
their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the
back settlements are already little attached to particular
situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian
Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense
plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred
miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of
restraint; they would change their manners with their habits
of life; would soon forget a government by which they were
disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring
down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible
cavalry, become masters of your governors and your
counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the
slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time
must, be the eff