But during the ’twenties and ’thirties of the 19th century, the men of the “old régime”--the founder and fighters of the young Republic--descended into the grave and they took their traditions, their hopes, and their beliefs with them. The curtain rose upon a new time and upon a new people. The acquisition of the Northwestern Territory in 1787 and the purchase of Napoleon’s American real-estate in the year 1803 had changed a little commonwealth of struggling Colonies into a vast empire of endless plains and unlimited forests. It was necessary to populate this new land. The history of the Coast came to an end. The history of the Frontier began. English traditions rarely crossed the Alleghanies. The long struggle for representative government took on a new aspect in a land where no king had ever set foot and where man was sovereign by the good right of his own energy. It is true that the first fifty years of the last century witnessed the arrival upon these shores of millions of men and women from Europe who had enjoyed a grammar school education in the land of their birth. But dukes do not emigrate. Those sturdy fellows who risked the terrors and horrors of the Atlantic in the leaky tubs of the early forties came to the country of their future that they might forget the nightmare of the past. That nightmare included the biography of Might which was then the main feature of the European text-book. They threw it overboard as soon as they were well outside of the mouth of the Elbe or the Mersey. Settled upon the farms of Michigan and Wisconsin, they sometimes taught their children the songs of the old Fatherland but its history never. After two generations, this migration--the greatest of all “treks” since the 4th century--came to an end. Roads had been made, canals had been dug, railroads had been constructed, forests had been turned into pastures, the Indian was gone, the buffalo was gone, free land was gone, cities had been built, and the scene had been made ready for the final apotheosis of all human accomplishment--civilization.