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74 F. G. YOUNG

their surroundings. These vouchsafed, bonds of sympathy and community of interest would arise affording the only really indispensable capital-fund for life enrichment. It must ever be borne in mind that out of the sublimated elements of a peo- ple's past their bibles are made. It must be their own essen- tial and peculiar achievements that become the well-spring of communal nobility from which issue the refinement of senti- ment, visions and ideals.

For this history of the "Economic Beginnings of the Far West," Miss Coman should have the credit of having made a unique initial contribution toward the end of enabling the west- erner to see each object of his surroundings as a burning bush. There are two characteristics in Miss Coman's handling of the source material for her work that give it its significance. For the first time the trans-Mississippi part of the country is identi- fied as having a degree of historical unity. The annals of the different sections of this region are made to show the under- lying unity in the movements through which the occupation of it was consummated. The progressive ensemble of result of the converging advances upon this territory by the Spaniard and Frenchman, and by the Russian, Englishman and Ameri- ca'n is revealed so clearly that it is seen as a whole from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nine- teenth. The essential features of the process through which the darkness of barbarism was dispelled from the whole of this realm are made assimilable. A mental picture of it as a whole is possible from the moment the first white man, a Spaniard, rode into its borders ; and a continuing visiori of it is presented uninterruptedly through three centuries until it is all assem- bled under the Stars and Stripes.

The "Economic Beginnings" of the title refers to the other characteristic that gives peculiar significance to Miss Coman's work. The prowess of virtue through which the white man supersedes the red mah and through which one type or nation- ality of white occupants supplants another has always been, and seems destined ever to be, a prowess in economic virtues. The