Like the people of the eastern seaboard, the men high in governmental authority were apt to look upon the frontiersmen with feelings dangerously akin to dislike and suspicion.

Nor were these feelings wholly unjustifiable.

The men who settle in a new country, and begin subduing the wilderness, plunge back into the very conditions from which the race has raised itself by the slow toil of ages.
Inevitable Shortcomings of the Frontiersmen.
The conditions cannot but tell upon them.

Inevitably, and for more than one lifetime--perhaps for several generations--they tend to retrograde, instead of advancing.

They drop away from the standard which highly civilized nations have reached.