Here across the Mississippi Valley is an exodus accomplished not of a single night, as these two of which I have just spoken, but extended through a hundred years of home leavings and love privations. Here is an anabasis of a century of privations, titanic labors, frontier battles, endured countless times, till these migrants of Europe and of the new- world seaboard, became, as children of the wilderness, a new people, with qualities so distinctive as to lead the highest authority [Footnote: Frederick J. Turner, "The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History," in Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (1909-10), 3:159-184.] on the history of that valley to characterize the west not as a geographic division of the United States, but as a "form of society" with its own peculiar flowering, developed, not as Parkman's magnificent fleur-de-lis, [Footnote: See Epilogue.] by cross- fertilization, nor by grafting, but simply by the planting or sowing of Old World seeds on new and free land, where the mountains kept off the pollen of alien spirit, where the puritanical winds of the New England coast were somewhat tempered by the warmer winds from the south, where the waters had some iron in them, but, most of all, where the soil was practically as free as when it came from the hands of the glaciers and the streams. 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." [Footnote: "American Commonwealth," 1913 ed., 2:892.] The French may dispute the implied claim of the second of these comparisons, but even they will have a satisfaction in admitting that their particular part of the United States is to the rest, which was not touched by their priests and explorers, what "Europe is to Asia." And here is my particular justification for asking the imaginations of the people of France to occupy and hold that to which the preface has given them the best of titles.