ABSTRACT
In this chapter Oliver Wendell Holmes speech to students at Harvard, looked back to his early years as a law student, and sought to persuade his audience and perhaps also himself that the law was a profession that could be heroic, in the sense Holmes understood heroism. Holmes was also speaking at a time when the opportunities for the kinds of heroic conquests of uncharted wildernesses, mental and physical alike, that Holmes had in mind were diminishing; both surveys and railroads, Holmes noted, have set limits to our intellectual wildernesses. Four years after Holmes delivered this address, the United States Census of 1890 revealed that the frontier had ceased to exist; the nation had, effectively, met in the middle. This prompted the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to develop his famous Frontier Thesis in 1893, which posited the alarmist suggestion that the democratic dynamism that underpinned the nation would diminish in the context of an increasingly closed national space.
