ment of mankind was largely due to the environmental influence of early America upon those who first came to it.

Unique environmental conditions surrounded the gestation of the free nation which all mankind looked upon, for four generations, as a beacon and a hope; surrounded the enunciation, in state papers, of ideas which, because they voiced deep aspirations of humanity, stirred and startled all the races of men and helped to change the political complexion of all the world.

In studying these environmental influences, it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that the emigration to America was a continuation of the westward movement of the Aryan peoples, which had proceeded for thousands of years until it was stopped by the barrier of the Atlantic.

This barrier brought the westward movement forcibly to an end. It caused Europe to fill up to a degree which, leaving no avenue of escape, engendered the conditions which resulted in feudalism and the retrograde centuries of Medievalism.

Many historians have sought to show the continuing influence upon American political thought of an expanding frontier. (1) *

Few historians, however, have as yet dealt exhaustively, in simple and perfectly human terms, with the general environmental influences affecting the emotions, thoughts, and activities of the first six generations of America.

The details have been carefully examined. But by envisaging the general influences one may gain clearer understanding of the relation of the American experience to the general stream of history and the general development of political institutions.

Within broad limits it may be declared that every individual who voluntarily came to America during the first two centuries came seeking some expanding or some freeing of himself. Either he sought power, wealth, fame, food, self-expansion of some sort; or he sought to free himself from some form of physical, spiritual, mental or emotional restriction. Everywhere in Europe the individual was either hemmed in or coerced by custom or conditions, by want or by prejudice, by master or by priest. Everywhere in America the wide expanses, the entire newness gave promise of less hampered indi

*These bracketed numbers throughout the introduction refer to the supplemental notes in Part Three, see page 314.

vidual development in any one of the million different directions in which men variously desire to grow or to move.

The very existence of a vast new continent must necessarily deeply influence the thought of those who passed over thousands of miles of water to get to it. And the cutting away from the static modes of life of an old civilisation stimulated and vitalised the individual pioneer and inevitably influenced every detail of his emotional and intellectual reaction to existence.

The more sparkling air of America, the more brilliant and more continuous sunlight, the necessary vigorous out-door activity, the sense of being constantly on the alert-necessitated by the presence of Indians, wild animals, and other potential dangers-all of these, it is immediately obvious, affected every individual in early pioneer America every minute of his daily life.

Every detail served to blast away congealed European customs, habits, totems, and tabus. Every detail served to engender new customs, habits; new emotions, new ideas.

There was, moreover, such abundance of food, after the first two generations, as Europeans had never known. In many parts of America the waters teemed with life, the air was filled with fowl, the soil had but to be touched to produce prodigious

crops.

Many of the early colonists came from classes which had possessed little vigor or energy or hardihood. But the pioneer conditions engendered strength of body and character. In three generations many of those who survived developed into such hardy, vigorous, and energetic men as have rarely been surpassed anywhere.

And once men had grown accustomed to the primitive pioneer conditions, once their chests had been expanded by vigorous labor out of doors, their stomachs filled with food easily secured-new self-confidence was engendered.

Away from the seacoast extended a practically illimitable expanse of land. If any conditions of life in the settlements grew irksome, if any attempt were made by anyone at any sort of oppression or exploitation, this land stood always open. And men-with new strength, new confidence, new spirit, new zest for fuller lives, richer experiences, greater freedom-had but to move into it, to move as their ancestors had moved for centuries and centuries long before, until the barrier of the

Atlantic had been reached, European stagnation had begun, and the oppressing and confining development of feudalism had progressed to such extent as to create the conditions prevalent throughout Europe when Columbus discovered America. Too large a population for relatively restricted areas of land cultivated by primitive methods had helped produce feudalism. In America was land enough for millions-fresh and fertile land in almost unimaginable quantity. This simple, basic fact underlies much that is new and characteristic in the ideas and institutions of the Western Hemisphere.

William Penn complained of some of his colonists that "having got out of the crowd in which they were lost here (in England) upon every eminency there, they think nothing taller than themselves but the trees."

And throughout the literature of this early period one finds evidence of the steadily increasing self-confidence, self-respect, and high spirit of individuality which later flowered in the Declaration of Independence and other documents.

The human spirit had long been dulled and confined in the old world. Oppression had been engendered ages before. The curtain of consciously recorded history arises on societies dominated by arbitrary power.

The individual man could escape the arbitrary authority of some man or men only by fleeing from the group and becoming a hermit or a perilously placed outcast. The greater portion of men were slaves either actually or to the extent that they had to obey authority or laws they had had no part in establishing. "Freedom" in the sense of absence of some arbitrary authority was, practically, nowhere known.

Yet those enslaved and made to carve the façades of Babylonian palaces and temples had doubtless dimly dreamed of such freedom and pondered at its loss. The slaves who labored to cover Egypt with the vainglorious monuments of Rameses II, who had set the man-power of a whole generation to raise monuments to his vanity, had vaguely dreamed of such freedom. The slaves who were lashed on by task-masters' whips in building the Roman roads had dreamed of such freedom. In the hovels of feudal Europe the serfs and villeins who were made to expend their energy for the private ends and pleasures of their masters, had dreamed of such freedom. Often men had fought for it, very temporarily obtained some portion of it. The Greek States, Rome-these had represented or seen

attempts to disrupt physical and mental oppression. Switzerland and Holland were but two of the European countries in which conditions had permitted sporadic attempts to disrupt or to temper coercion. (2)

Down All History the Individual Had

Been Submerged in the Group.

Theocracy, autocracy-these had developed quickly. It may be asserted that the political history of all the race represents, on the one hand, the rapid development of the efficient machinery of exploitation by those who have seized power or those to whom men have had to entrust power; and, on the other hand, the slow and painful development of the fumbling, cumbrous machinery of democracy and freedom to contend against it. Down all history the group had been coerced by the arbitrary will of some man or men within the group. The individual had been submerged in the group thus coerced.

As oppression had developed in the early centers of occidental civilisation, individual men or tribes-seeking freedom -had moved west until farther movement was impossible.

But oppression or coercion always quickly caught up with them. In Medieval Europe it took the form of feudalism.

Feudalism.

Looking back we can see feudalism and its concomitant political, economic and social devices as a great steel net holding down, crushing, oppressing the bodies and spirits of men throughout all Europe, throughout even that Great Britain which had a larger portion of technical political freedom than any other part of the occidental world.

The productivity of man was, in Europe during the Middle Ages, definitely limited. The differences in capacity, in strength and guile among men were-as always-very marked. Of the limited productions of mankind the more powerful, the more crafty took the lion's share. The cunningly contrived and powerful net of feudalism pressed it out of the great masses for those who gave Europe a semblance of order by holding these masses together by institutions originatingnot in reason-but in physical force or in craft and cunning.

In Hakluyt's "Voyages" will be found a plea from Walter Raleigh for adventurers to go with him to one of his colonies.

"England is full," he declared substantially, "of able-bodied and vigorous men remaining in bed all day that they may not get cold and hungry. Come with me to the new world." The slums of London, Paris and other cities, the misery of the rural dwellers, the poverty resulting from the Acts of Enclosure all of these are random indications of the conditions inevitably engendered by the barrier of the Atlantic which, rendering further western advance impossible centuries before, had permitted and fostered such rapid development of the machinery of exploitation that the very spirit of humanity was affected and the current of human liberty driven underground and made to run slowly and futilely.

The First Movement to the New World Not Consciously in Search of Political Freedom.

So slowly had the current of human liberty been brought to flow that the first movement of Europeans into the new world opened for them, was not consciously in search of that political freedom of which men had dreamed down thousands of years.

The discovery and the ensuing rapid explorations were due to desire to find new trade routes to the Orient and to proselytise for Christianity.

The early Latin adventurers sought wealth and luxury. One seeks almost vainly through the literature of early Spanish and Portuguese conquest and colonisation for any conscious expression of desire for either political, economic or religious freedom. The adventurers were, or soon became, close to their respective crowns. The church, in part actuated with missionary zeal, quickly developed, apparently without protest, the Inquisition and its concomitant rapacity in America to a degree scarcely attempted even in Europe.

Even the English colonists coming a century later did not at first articulately or consciously seek new political or economic freedom. The folkways of Medievalism had become too strong. Against definite acts of oppression the John Balls might write and the Wat Tylers might contend. There were always, somewhere, occasional ineffectual attempts to resist authority and coercion. There was, of course, that latent spirit later to express itself in the writings of Milton and others and to produce Cromwell. Throughout the old world in general, however, men appear to have accepted the existing political conditions as almost inevitable. (3)