one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The pre-emption law allows him to dispose of his cabin and corn-field to the next class of emigrants; and to employ his own figure, he "breaks for the high timber," "clears out for the new purchase," or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.

The next class of emigrants purchase the land, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, school-houses, court-houses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life.

Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior, and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther

on. . .

...

The writer has traveled much among the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connec

tion with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the West. Hundreds of men can be found, not over fifty years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners.

This description, allowing for regional differences in the physical character of the country, represents in a general way a process which has been going on for a hundred years throughout the greater part of the United States. It is this "perennial rebirth," this continual renewal of the process of social evolution, this continual mobility of the population, that has kept America from growing prematurely old. This it is which has broken sectional barriers and made impossible the establishment of rigid class distinctions, which has developed a composite American national character, which has enabled Americans to retain to so great a degree the simplicity of their original political institutions and in such full measure their faith in democracy.

"In 1789 the states were the creators of the federal government; in 1861 the federal government was the creator of a large majority of the states." This concise statement reveals one very fundamental influence which

Western expansion had upon the history of the United States. It did more than any other single thing to weaken the old sentiment of state sovereignty and to strengthen the sentiment of nationalism. The men who migrated from Virginia and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts into the upper Ohio Valley very rapidly lost touch with the states from which they had come. They perhaps retained for a time a certain kindly recollection of the old home, but the sense of loyalty to the state inevitably disappeared. On the other hand, they had bought their land from the federal government, they lived for some years in the "Territory of Ohio," a temporary government controlled by the Congress of the United States, and when the territory of Ohio was admitted as a state in the Union it was by act of the federal government. In a very real sense the state of Ohio was the creature of the federal government, and it was the same with all of the new states admitted to the Union after 1789.

The new Western states were not only the creatures of the federal government, they naturally turned to the federal government for aid in many things. One primary need of the Western country was better means of transportation. As soon as they had a surplus of food products they needed to have access

to the Eastern markets; and, therefore, the West demanded the construction of better roads, and of canals, and, later, of railroadsenterprises which could be carried through only by the aid of the federal government itself. Furthermore, the Western agricultural states required manufactured commodities, and the Eastern states, in order to meet this demand, and also because their less fertile lands could not compete successfully with the West, began to develop manufactures. In order to protect these "infant industries" against foreign competition, the Middle and New England states wanted a system of tariff duties laid on on importation from abroad. Through a system of tariffs and a system of "Internal Improvements," the federal government exercised a powerful influence in developing the economic life of the country and thereby acquired a political power and prestige undreamed of by the framers of the Constitution.

The expansion of population into the Western country contributed also in a less obvious but more profound way to the development of a feeling of nationality. In the Western country sectional differences and jealousies tended to disappear through the mingling of people from different sections. The people who made the state of Ohio came chiefly from

Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. These men and women, thrown together in the equalizing conditions of a primitive wilderness society, rapidly lost those characteristics that made them peculiar. It was soon found that Puritan or Quaker, German Mennonite or Virginia Episcopalians were all very human persons when it came to clearing the forest, planting corn, fighting the Indians, and preserving a decent amount of law and order. In this mingling of people from the older regions, local exclusiveness and suspicion necessarily gave way to a more national, even a more catholic attitude of mind-an effect greatly strengthened by the large influx of foreign immigrants after 1820. When the mobility of population was always so great, the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern. The term "outlandish" lost its significance, and the term "stranger," among primitive peoples identical with "enemy," became thoughout the West a common form of friendly salutation.

The Westerner was crude and uncultivated, ignorant of books, and lacking in the niceties and refinements of life; but his varied experience of men and places, his close contact with the hard realities of life, emancipated