without aid, without consultation, without the chastening or the stimulation of contact and attrition. Each region cherished its own prejudices, its own dialect, its own ways of living, its own overweening self-consciousness of superiority to all the rest, its own narrow bigotries, and its own suspicious contempt of everything foreign to itself.

In brief, we had no national life in the eighteen-forties, or for long afterwards,—no community of thought, or custom, or attitude of mind. The several parts of the country were a loose bundle of segregated and, in many ways, antagonistic communities, bound together only by a common loyalty to the conviction that this was the greatest, most glorious, most invincible country in the world, God-endowed with a mental, moral, and physical superiority that put all the rest of earth's nations completely out of the reckoning. We were all of us Americans—intense, self-satisfied, self-glorifying Americans—but we had little else in common. We did not know each other. We had been bred in radically different ways. We had different ideals, different conceptions of life, different standards of conduct, different ways of living, different traditions, and different aspirations. The country was provincial to the rest of the world, and still more narrowly provincial each region to the others.

IV

The Composite West

I think, however, that the West was less provincial, probably, and less narrow in its views and sympathies than were New England, the Middle States, and the South at that time, and this for a very sufficient reason.

The people in New England rarely came into contact with those of the Middle and Southern States, and never with those of the West. The people of the Middle States and those of the South were similarly shut within themselves, having scarcely more than an imaginary acquaintance with the dwellers in other parts of the country. The West was a common meeting ground where men from New England, the Middle States, and the South Atlantic region constituted a varied population, representative of all the rest of the country, and dwelling together in so close a unity that each group adopted many of the ways and ideas of the other groups, and correspondingly modified its own. These were first steps taken toward homogeneity in the West, such as were taken in no other part of the country in that time of little travel and scanty intercourse among men. The Virginians, Carolinians, and New Englanders who had migrated to the West learned to make and appreciate the apple butter and the sauerkraut of the Pennsylvanians; the pie of New England found favor with Southerners in return for their hoecake, hominy, chine, and spareribs. And as with material things, so also with things of the mind. Customs were blended, usages were borrowed and modified, opinions were fused together into new forms, and speech was wrought into something different from that which any one group had known—a blend, better, richer, and more forcible than any of its constituent parts had been.

In numbers the Virginians, Kentuckians, and Carolinians were a strong majority in the West, and the so-called "Hoosier dialect," which prevailed there, was nearly identical with that of the Virginian mountains, Kentucky, and the rural parts of Carolina. But it was enriched with many terms and forms of speech belonging to other sections. Better still, it was chastened by the influence of the small but very influential company of educated men and women who had come from Virginia and Kentucky, and by the strenuous labors in behalf of good English of the Yankee school-ma'ams, who taught us by precept to make our verbs agree with their nominatives, and, per contra, by unconscious example to say "doo," "noo," and the like, for "dew," "new," etc.

The prevalence of the dialect among the uneducated classes was indeed, though indirectly, a ministry to the cause of good English. The educated few, fearing contamination of their children's speech through daily contact with the ignorant, were more than usually strict in exacting correct usage at the hands of their youngsters. I very well remember how grievously it afflicted my own young soul that I was forbidden, under penalty, to say "chimbly" and "flanner" for "chimney" and "flannel," to call inferior things "ornery," to use the compromise term "'low"—abbreviation of "allow,"—which very generally took the place of the Yankee "guess" and the Southern "reckon," and above all to call tomatoes "tomatices."

It is of interest to recall the fact that this influential class of educated men and women, included some really scholarly persons, as well as a good many others who, without being scholarly, were educated and accustomed to read. Among the scholarly ones, within the purview of my memory, were such as Judge Algernon S. Stevens, Judge Algernon S. Sullivan, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, the Hendrickses, the Stapps, the Rev. Hiram Wason, my own father, and Mrs. Julia L. Dumont, a very brilliant woman, who taught school for love of it and wrote books that in our time would have given her something more than the provincial reputation she shared with Alice and Phœbe Cary, and some others.

V

The Sturdy Kentuckians

Of still greater consequence, perhaps, so far as influence upon their time and country was concerned, were the better class of Kentuckians who had crossed the Ohio to become sharers in the future of the great Northwest.

These were mostly men of extraordinary energy—physical and mental—who had mastered what the Kentucky schoolmasters could teach them, and had made of their schooling the foundation of a broader education the dominant characteristic of which was an enlightenment of mind quite independent of scholarly acquisition.

These men were thinkers accustomed, by habit and inheritance, to look facts straight in the face, to form their own opinions untrammeled by tradition, unbiased by fine-spun equivocation, and wholly unrestrained in their search for truth by conventional hobbles of any kind. Most of them had more or less Scotch-Irish blood in their veins, and were consequently wholesome optimists, full of courage, disposed to righteousness of life for its own sake, and resolutely bent upon the betterment of life by means of their own living.

Most of them numbered one or more Baptist or Methodist preachers among their ancestry—men of healthy minds and open ones, men to whom religion was far less a matter of emotion than of conduct, men who did the duty that lay next to them—be it plowing or praying, preaching or fighting Indians or Englishmen—with an equal mind.

Men of such descent were educated by environment in better ways than any that schools can furnish. From infancy they had lived in an atmosphere of backwoods culture,—culture drawn in part from such books as were accessible to them, and in greater part from association with the strong men who had migrated in early days to conquer the West and make of it a princely possession of the Republic.

The books they had were few, but they were the very best that English literature afforded, and they read them over and over again with diligence and intelligence until they had made their own every fecundative thought the books suggested. Then they went away, and thought for themselves, with untrammeled freedom, of the things thus presented to their minds. I have sometimes wondered if their method of education, chiefly by independent thinking, and with comparatively little reverence for mere "authority," might not have been better, in its