charged behind Rupert. When the great western movement began we were
already a people by ourselves. Moreover, the immense immigration from
Europe that has taken place since, had little or no effect on the way
in which we extended our boundaries; it only began to be important
about the time that we acquired our present limits. These limits would
in all probability be what they now are even if we had not received a
single European colonist since the Revolution.

Thus the Americans began their work of western conquest as a separate
and individual people, at the moment when they sprang into national
life. It has been their great work ever since. All other questions
save those of the preservation of the Union itself and of the
emancipation of the blacks have been of subordinate importance when
compared with the great question of how rapidly and how completely
they were to subjugate that part of their continent lying between the
eastern mountains and the Pacific. Yet the statesmen of the Atlantic
seaboard were often unable to perceive this, and indeed frequently
showed the same narrow jealousy of the communities beyond the
Alleghanies that England felt for all America. Even if they were too
broad-minded and far-seeing to feel thus, they yet were unable to
fully appreciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in the west.
They thought more of our right to the North Atlantic fisheries than of
our ownership of the Mississippi valley; they were more interested in
the fate of a bank or a tariff than in the settlement of the Oregon
boundary. Most contemporary writers showed similar shortcomings in
their sense of historic perspective. The names of Ethan Allen and
Marion are probably better known than is that of George Rogers Clark;
yet their deeds, as regards their effects, could no more be compared
to his, than his could be compared to Washington's. So it was with
Houston. During his lifetime there were probably fifty men who, east