western Pennsylvania, just as similar conditions later suggested the secession of the Pacific States from the Union.  Disaffection from the government was manifested by the Trek Boers of early South Africa, “especially by those who dwelt in the outlying districts where the Government had exerted and could exert little control.”  In 1795 the people of Graaf-Reinet, a frontier settlement of that time, revolted against the Dutch South African Company and set up a miniature republic.[389]

[Sidenote:  The spirit of colonial frontiers.]

The spirit of the colonial frontier is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of men who have traveled far, who are surcharged with energy, enterprise and self-reliance, often with impatience of restraint.  A severe process of elimination culls out for the frontier a population strikingly differentiated from the citizens of the old inhabited centers.  Then remoteness of location and abundance of opportunity proceed to emphasize the qualities which have squeezed through the sieve of natural and social selection.  This is the type bred upon our own frontier, which, West beyond West, has crossed the continent from the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains to the Pacific.  The Siberian frontier develops much the same type on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire.  Here army officers find a compensation for their rough surrounding in the escape from the excessive bureaucracy of the capitals.  Here is to be noted the independence, self-reliance and self-respect characteristic of other colonial frontiers.  The Russian of the Asiatic border is proud to call himself a Siberian:  he is already differentiated in his own consciousness.  The force of Moscow tradition and discipline is faint when it reaches him, it has traveled so far.  Even the elaborate observances of the orthodox Greek Church tend to become simplified on the frontier.  The question naturally arises whether in the Russian Empire, as in the United States, the political periphery will in time, react upon the center, infuse it with the spirit of progress and youth.[390]

[Sidenote:  Free border states as political survivals.]

When to a border situation is added a geographic location affording conditions of long-established isolation, this tendency to maintain political autonomy becomes very pronounced.  This is the explanation of so many frontier mountain states that have retained complete or partial independence, such as Nepal, Bhutan, the Asturias, which successfully withstood Saracen attack, and Montenegro, which has repelled alike Venetian, Servian, and Turkish dominion.  Europe especially has numerous examples of these unabsorbed border states, whose independence represents the equilibrium of the conflicting political attractions about them.  But all these smallest fragments of political territory have either some commercial or semi-political union with one or another of their neighbors.  The little independent principality of Liechtenstein, wedged