Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.

These shortcomings were not special or peculiar to the frontiersmen of the Ohio valley at the close of the eighteenth century.  All our frontiersmen have betrayed a tendency towards them at times, though the exhibitions of this tendency have grown steadily less and less decided.  In Vermont, during the years between the close of the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution, the state of affairs was very much what it was in Kentucky at the same time. [Footnote:  Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, xi., No. 2, pp. 160-165, Letters of Levi Allen, Ethan Allen, and others, from 1787 to 1790.] In each territory there was acute friction with a neighboring State.  In each there was a small knot of men who wished the community to keep out of the new American nation, and to enter into some sort of alliance with a European nation, England in one case, Spain in the other.  In each there was a considerable but fluctuating separatist party, desirous that the territory should become an independent nation on its own account.  In each case the separatist movements failed, and the final triumph lay with the men of broadly national ideas, so that both Kentucky and Vermont became States of one indissoluble Union.

    Final Triumph of the Union Party.

This final triumph of the Union party in these first-formed frontier States was fraught with immeasurable good for them and for the whole nation of which they became parts.  It established a precedent for the action of all the other States that sprang into being as the frontier rolled westward.  It decided that the interior of North America should form part of one great Republic, and should not be parcelled out among a crowd of English-speaking Uruguays and Ecquadors, powerful only to damage one another, and helpless to exact respect from alien foes or to keep order in their own households.  It vastly increased the significance of the outcome of the Revolution, for it decided that its after-effects should be felt throughout the entire continent, not merely in the way of example, but by direct impress.  The creation of a nation stretching along the Atlantic seaboard was of importance in itself, but the importance was immensely increased when once it was decided that the nation should cover a region larger than all Europe.

    Excuses for Some of the Separatists.

While giving unlimited praise to the men so clearsighted, and of such high thought, that from the beginning they foresaw the importance of the Union, and strove to include all the West therein, we must beware of blaming overmuch those whose vision was less acute.  The experiment of the Union was as yet inchoate; its benefits were prospective; and loyalty to it was loyalty to a splendid idea the realization of which lay in the future rather than in the present.  All honor must be awarded to the men who under such conditions could be loyal to so high an ideal; but we must not