The things we do!

It is this distinctiveness of development, due to the mountains' challenge
to every man's spirit as he passed, to the isolation which compelled him
to work out his own salvation, and to the constant struggle, largely
single-handed, with frontier forces--as well as the uniqueness of
background--that gave the west a character which identifies it to
discerning minds quite as much as its geographic boundaries. It is this
fact which makes the French pioneering preface to a civilization different
from anything that has developed elsewhere in the United States, and not
only different in the past but now the dominant force in American
education, politics, and industry.
What that civilization would have been without the adventurous French
preface we can but vainly surmise. What it is with that background, that
preface, is indeed the "foremost chapter in the files of time." As
Ambassador James Bryce has said: "What Europe is to Asia, what England is
to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the western States
are to the Atlantic States.


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