Go Where We Will On The _Surface_ Of Things, Men
Have Been There Before Us.
We cannot now have the pleasure of
erecting the _last_ house; that was long ago set up in the
suburbs of Astoria City, and our boundaries have literally been
run to the South Sea, according to the old patents.
But the
lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are
still as shallow as ever. Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said,
"Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long
and narrow, and others live broad and short"; but it is all
superficial living. A worm is as good a traveller as a
grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all
their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to
summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising
above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and
frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers are not east
or west, north or south, but wherever a man _fronts_ a fact,
though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled
wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting
sun, or, farther still, between him and _it_. Let him build
himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, _fronting_
^it^, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy
years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come
between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.
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