In many a war they have overcome every European rival
against whom they have been pitted. Again and again they have marched to
victory against Frenchman and Spaniard through the sweltering heat of
the tropics; and now, from the stupendous mountain masses of mid Asia,
they look northward through the wintry air, ready to bar the advance of
the legions of the Czar. Hitherto they have never gone back save once;
they have failed only when they sought to stop the westward march of a
mighty nation, a nation kin to theirs, a nation of their own tongue and
law, and mainly of their own blood.
The Frontiersmen and the British.
The British officers and the American border leaders found themselves
face to face in the wilderness as rivals of one another. Sundered by
interest and ambition, by education and the habits of thought,
trained to widely different ways of looking at life, and with the
memories of the hostile past fresh in their minds, they were in no humor
to do justice to one another. Each side regarded the other with jealousy
and dislike, and often with bitter hatred. Each often unwisely scorned
the other. Each kept green in mind the wrongs suffered at the other's
hands, and remembered every discreditable fact in the other's recent
history--every failure, every act of cruelty or stupidity, every deed
that could be held as the consequence of the worst moral and mental
shortcomings.
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