refuse to see the many strong and admirable qualities in some of the men who looked less keenly into the future.  It would be mere folly [Footnote:  R. T. Durrett, “Centenary of Kentucky,” 64.] to judge a man who in 1787 was lukewarm or even hostile to the Union by the same standard we should use in testing his son’s grandson a century later.  Finally, where a man’s general course was one of devotion to the Union, it is easy to forgive him some momentary lapse, due to a misconception on his part of the real needs of the hour, or to passing but intense irritation at some display of narrow indifference to the rights of his section by the people of some other section.  Patrick Henry himself made one slip when he opposed the adoption of the Federal Constitution; but this does not at all offset the services he rendered our common country both before and afterwards.  Every statesman makes occasional errors; and the leniency of judgment needed by Patrick Henry, and needed far more by Ethan Allen, Samuel Adams, and George Clinton, must be extended to frontier leaders for whose temporary coldness to the Union there was much greater excuse.

    Characteristics of the Frontiersmen.

When we deal, not with the leading statesmen of the frontier communities, but with the ordinary frontier folk themselves, there is need to apply the same tests used in dealing with the rude, strong peoples of by-gone ages.  The standard by which international, and even domestic, morality is judged, must vary for different countries under widely different conditions, for exactly the same reasons that it must vary for different periods of the world’s history.  We cannot expect the refined virtues of a highly artificial civilization from frontiersmen who for generations have been roughened and hardened by the same kind of ferocious wilderness toil that once fell to the lot of their remote barbarian ancestors.

The Kentuckian, from his clearing in the great forest, looked with bold and greedy eyes at the Spanish possessions, much as Markman, Goth, and Frank had once peered through their marshy woods at the Roman dominions.  He possessed the virtues proper to a young and vigorous race; he was trammelled by few misgivings as to the rights of the men whose lands he coveted; he felt that the future was for the stout-hearted, and not for the weakling.  He was continually hampered by the advancing civilization of which he was the vanguard, and of which his own sous were destined to form an important part.  He rebelled against the restraints imposed by his own people behind him exactly as he felt impelled to attack the alien peoples in front of him.  He did not care very much what form the attack took.  On the whole he preferred that it should be avowed war, whether waged under the stars and stripes or under some flag new-raised by himself and his fellow-adventurers of the border.  In default of such a struggle, he was ready to serve under alien banners, either those of some nation at the moment