One other element may be taken into consideration, the effect of the frontier. Until thirty years ago, America has always had a frontier, and that fact has been of prime importance in many respects for the national outlook. For our purpose we may merely note that in the rough life of the border there is scant recognition for law as law. Frequently remote from the courts and authority of the established communities left behind, the frontiersman not only has to enforce his own law, but he elects what laws he shall enforce and what he shall cease to observe. Payment of debt, especially to the older settlements, may come to be looked upon lightly, whereas horse stealing may be punishable with shooting at sight. III When the colonies united and won their independence and the United States was formed, there had thus already[Pg 110] developed a fairly definite attitude toward law and authority. In many respects, owing mainly to their economic prosperity, the colonies were more law-abiding than Europe. In all my research, for example, I have found only one case of a traveler being robbed on the highways. Moreover, the colonists came to be a kindly and hospitable folk, and crimes involving brutality were proportionately less common than in the Europe of that day or the United States of this. But the essential point is that Americans had developed a marked tendency to obey only such laws as they chose to obey, and a disregard of law as law. Laws which did not suit the people, or even certain classes, were disobeyed constantly, with impunity and without thought. A habit had grown up of attempting to thwart the courts and judges, of distrusting the executive, and of relying solely upon the legislatures. Juries had got into the way of not considering the law, but merely their own or their neighbor’s interests. When cases became desperate or law officers made some show of real enforcement, as did occasionally a rare Surveyor of the Woods or a customhouse officer, they were taken care of by mobs, and as a rule the absence of any real force behind the show of royal authority made the officials powerless. In the national period we shall see the fruits of this long training in disrespect for law.