The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Volume 1, 1917-1918Various
History
The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Volume 1, 1917-1918
Various
Wisconsin -- History -- Periodicals
I haven’t the slightest intention of answering these questions here; I
freely admit that many of them leave me perplexed, but I dogmatically
maintain that it is by pondering such questions, by studying the
comparisons they suggest, that the frontier problem is to be
understood by the historian and comprehended by the statesman. Without
such comparisons the student of the problem in any one field is less
apt to judge a particular episode rightly than a man with no knowledge
and good intentions. The path to wisdom and sure-footed action must be
founded on the rock of exact knowledge, but it must be platted on a
wide-spread survey.
All life reveals the irony of wisdom attained only by the experience
to deal with which it was needed. It is but today we have this rich
storehouse of experimental frontier building, and tomorrow we will
have no frontier. It might seem that we could let a dead past bury its
dead, that the study of frontier episodes, however successful, has
become sheer antiquarianism. Such a view, however, minimizes the world
frontier that remains and the time and effort that will be required in
its conquest. As in science, so with the material world, the
nineteenth century made easy sweeping advances; it left much that was
difficult for the slower and more laborious labors of the twentieth.
It overlooks the facts that great masses of the world’s inhabitants
today count the experience of meeting the wild first-hand among the
most important of their nearby inheritances, that the frontier set its
mark upon them or their parents, or grandparents, and that the present
generation cannot be understood unless the frontier is understood.
Still more important is the consideration that in many instances the
frontier merely localizes problems that are general. The factors with
which this paper has dealt are peculiar to the frontier only in that
the creditors are assembled in one section, the debtors in another.
This is an important peculiarity in large part because it isolates the
characteristics of each, and makes them easier of study. When the
world has been fully occupied, new frontiers will appear, are already
appearing. Natural resources now undreamed of will need capital and
labor for their exploitation, will be susceptible of development in
more than one way, and will raise problems of control. Our experiences
with the rude and simple problem of the first occupation of a waste
area will seem as geometry to calculus compared with those raised by
these new frontiers, but will be as essential to a wise handling of
them as geometry is to calculus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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