Individuals as well as problems have emerged from the line of the frontier as it has advanced across a continent. In the conflict with the wilderness, birth, education, wealth, and social standing have counted for little in comparison with strength, vigor, and aggressive courage. The life there has always been hard, killing off the weaklings or driving them back to the settlements, and leaving as a result a picked population not noteworthy for its culture or its refinements, but eminent in qualities of positive force for good or bad. The bad man has been quite as typical of the frontier as the hero, but both have possessed its dominant virtues of self-confidence, vigor, and initiative. Thus it has been that the men of the frontiers have exerted an influence upon national affairs far out of proportion to their strength in numbers. The influence of the frontier has been the strongest single factor in American history, exerting its power from the first days of the earliest settlements down to the last years of the nineteenth century, when the frontier left the map. No other force has been continuous in its influence throughout four centuries. Men still live whose characters have developed under its pressure. The colonists of New England were not too early for its shaping. The earliest American frontier was in fact a European frontier, separated by an ocean from the life at home and meeting a wilderness in every extension. English commercial interests, stimulated by the successes of Spain and Portugal, began the organization of corporations and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended. The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always, determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the contour of the seaboard along which it lay.