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 staked out, sparsely settled, and brought under rude but productive cultivation. Facts, as Carlyle would say, immense and indubitable!

This inland advance of colonial empire accelerated the tendency toward the predominance of the freehold farmer in the agricultural economy of America. It was the man fired by the passion for owning a plot of ground who led the vanguard of settlers all along the frontier from New Hampshire to Georgia; to him cheap land meant freedom, to his family a rude but sufficient comfort. So the English, German, and Scotch-Irish pioneers who crept out into the narrow valleys, out into the deep forests, and high into the piedmont carried with them the freehold system and the social order inevitably associated with it. They were not peasants, in the European sense of the word, surrounded by agricultural resources already exploited and encircled by ruling orders of landlords and clergy armed with engines of state and church for subduing laborers to social discipline. On the contrary, these marching pioneers were confronted by land teeming with original fertility, by forests and streams alive with game and fish, and they were, under the sun and stars, their own masters.

In these circumstances a new psychology was evoked, making a race of men and women utterly different in spirit from those who dwelt on the great manors of New York and Maryland, on the wide Southern plantations, and in the villages of the Old World. Moreover, these freehold farmers faced the New West, not Europe; their communities were more isolated, more provincial, more independent, more American than those along the Atlantic seaboard. Passing years but strengthened their fiber and their love of liberty, while the ties of memory and affection that bound them to the Old World faded into oblivion.

Inexorably the currents of their life and thought ran in new channels. They would not have been at home in the goodly gatherings of Doctor Johnson's Grub Street friends, nor could they have deported themselves correctly with