[Sidenote:  The mind of colonials.]

The best type of colonial expansion is found among the English-speaking people of America, Australia and South Africa.  Their spacial ideas are built on a big scale.  Distances do not daunt them.  The man who could conceive a Cape-to-Cairo railroad, with all the schemes of territorial aggrandizement therein implied, had a mind that took continents for its units of measure; and he found a fitting monument in a province of imperial proportions whereon was inscribed his name.  Bryce tells us that in South Africa the social circle of “the best people” includes Pretoria, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Cape Town—­a social circle with a diameter of a thousand miles![323]

The spirit of our western frontier, so long as there was a frontier, was the spirit of movement, of the conquest of space.  It found its expression in the history of the Wilderness Road and the Oregon Trail.  When the center of population in the United States still lingered on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, and the frontier of continuous settlement had not advanced beyond the present western boundary of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the spacious mind of Thomas Jefferson foresaw the Mississippi Valley as the inevitable and necessary possession of the American people, and looked upon the trade of the far-off Columbia River as a natural feeder of the Mississippi commerce.[324]

Emerson’s statement that the vast size of the United States is reflected in the big views of its people applies not only to political policy, which in the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in history has embraced a hemisphere; nor is it confined to the big scale of their economic processes.  Emerson had in mind rather their whole conception of national mission and national life, especially their legislation,[325] for which he anticipated larger and more Catholic aims than obtain in Europe, hampered as it is by countless political and linguistic boundaries and barred thereby from any far-reaching unity of purpose and action.

Canada, British South Africa, Australia and the United States, though widely separated, have in common a certain wide outlook upon life, a continental element in the national mind, bred in their people by their generous territories.  The American recognizes his kinship of mind with these colonial Englishmen as something over and above mere kinship of race.  It consists in their deep-seated common democracy, the democracy born in men who till fields and clear forests, not as plowmen and wood-cutters, but as makers of nations.  It consists in identical interests and points of view in regard to identical problems growing out of the occupation and development of new and almost boundless territories.  Race questions, paucity of labor, highways and railroads, immigration, combinations of capital, excessive land holdings, and illegal appropriation of land on a large scale, are problems that meet them all.  The monopolistic