itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away
all our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and
fall of this or that partisan aggregation in our government; take
away our somewhat inglorious military past; but leave us forever
the tradition of the American frontier! There lies our comfort
and our pride. There we never have failed. There, indeed, we
always realized our ambitions. There, indeed, we were efficient,
before that hateful phrase was known. There we were a melting-pot
for character, before we came to know that odious appellation
which classifies us as the melting-pot of the nations.

The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the
self-sufficient but restless individual. It was the home of the
rebel, the protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the
ardent--and the resolute. It was not the conservative and tender
man who made our history; it was the man sometimes illiterate,
oftentimes uncultured, the man of coarse garb and rude weapons.
But the frontiersmen were the true dreamers of the nation. They
really were the possessors of a national vision. Not statesmen
but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest conclusions of
American history still rest upon premises which they laid.

But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country.
It lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. When
and what was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time
of Drake and the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North
America was a frontier, almost wholly unknown, compellingly
alluring to all bold men. That was the day of new stirrings in
the human heart. Some strange impulse seemed to act upon the soul
of the braver and bolder Europeans; and they moved westward, nor