" [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime
in Canada," p. 347.]
Like Aeneas, therefore, these filial emigrants, seeking new homes, not
only carried their _lares et penates_ in their arms but bore upon their
shoulders their father Anchises.
Succeeding savage individualism, this benevolent despotism gave the valley
into the keeping of an individualism even purer and less restrained than
that which it succeeded, for the sparse pioneer transmontane settlements
were practically governed at first by only the consciences or whims of the
inhabitants, instructed of parental commandments learned the other side of
the mountains, and by their love of forest and of their prairie neighbors.
And when formal government came a pure democracy, social and political--it
came of individual interest and neighborly love and of no abstract
philosophical theory or of protest against oligarchy; it came from the
application, voluntary for the most part, of "older institutions and ideas
to the transforming influence of land," free land; and such has been the
result, says Professor Turner, [Footnote: See his "Significance of the
Frontier in American History," in "Fifth Yearbook of the National Herbart
Society, 1899," also his "Significance of the Mississippi Valley in
American History," in "Mississippi Valley Historical Association
Proceedings, 1909-10.
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