The seaboard was soon comfortably settled, but the frontier kept extending and extending and absorbing the interest and energies of the people. In 1890 even the physical[Pg 229] frontier was officially declared closed and ended by the government, but it made no difference, for the people were as busy and worn out as ever settling themselves in a wholly new country, the country of “the high standard of living.” The settlers who two centuries ago had to jettison their cultural heritage and interests in order to cut down trees and snipe at Indians skulking behind those that had not yet been cut, have been replaced by the settlers in the Country of the High Standard who have to jettison their cultural tastes (the heritage has gone) in order to pay rent, get a cook, have two or three bathrooms and a motor car or two in this new frontier country of the Standard. They are just as pressed, hard-working and weary as their forefathers, and from the same reason,—trying to attain a standard of physical well-being to which they think they ought to attain in their own generation in an environment in which the old physical difficulties have merely been replaced by economic ones. I have not, as yet, had a chance to read Mr. and Mrs. Lynd’s Middletown, but it is, I understand, a very careful and not exaggerated study of a town of forty thousand people in the Middle West, yet a review says that it shows that “literature and art have virtually disappeared as male interests.” It is what always happens in any frontier life, and America has replaced the old geographical frontier by the Living-standard one. In the old days, we used to tell critical foreigners that we had been so busy settling and subduing a continent that we had had no time for culture. Well, we have jolly well settled and subdued it. We have roped it, and thrown it, and eaten a good part of it up. But before we had time to get our breath we have gone off on a[Pg 230] gold rush to this new land of the High Standard. Because it is on no map, there is no telling how big it is or how long it will take to settle and subdue it. Meanwhile the total energies of a good many of us are absorbed in “sawing wood” like our ancestors and protecting ourselves from the savages under the changed conditions imposed by settling this new country that can be found in no atlas. When the old frontier ended at the Pacific Ocean we had at least some limit set to the physical and mental energy necessary to make it habitable for civilized men, but one wonders to-day, as one swings one’s economic axe and turns one’s back on the shelf of books one would like to have time to read, where in heck is the Pacific Coast of this new country we have started to subdue.