Τι HE last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with vaster combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the state of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent state. The area which settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had been accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former experience. The Great Lakes, the prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to cooperation and to governmental activity. F. J. TURNER. E are here [in Turkey] not as rivals, we are here to share with the people of the East the best things we have in the West, or rather to exchange the best things that the East and West have received. For the whole world needs the whole world. HOWARD S. BLISS. CHAPTER XX THE NEW ENGLAND TYPE MODIFIED BY WORLD CONTACTS In previous chapters we have sought to survey in the large and in particulars the movements outward from New England as its sons and daughters during the last century and a half have gone into every part of the world. We have seen them departing, singly, in pairs, in groups, in colonies. We have followed their slow and toilsome journeys in emigrant wagons, on canal boats and on such lake and river craft as their day and generation provided. We have watched them clearing the forests, bridging streams, putting their plowshares into virgin soil, building their rude homes, churches, schools and town houses according to the pattern seen on the hilltops and in the valleys of Old New England. We have noted the humble beginnings of what are now fair cities and great commonwealths, equipped with all that twentieth century invention, industry and educational and religious impulses furnish. It has not been claimed that the New England migration differed notably from other historic migrations in outward circumstances or in the play of certain motives, not all of them idealistic. The laws which govern emigrant movements in every age and in all parts of the world were operative in New England in the period under survey. New Englanders were compelled to migrate, just as the inhabitants of Central Europe and of Japan are driven forth by the pressure of population. In the case of these New Englanders the lure of land, especially of more arable land, made its powerful appeal. It drew Yankee farmers away from the rocky pastures and fields from which they had sought to wrest a living to the alluvial river valleys and the fertile prairies of the West. The element of adventure also had its part, especially in the case of ambitious young men conscious of their powers. Then, too, as in every human undertaking of this kind there were those who went simply because others were going and because, never having made good where they were, they dimly hoped they would succeed better in a new world. And still others went because they wanted to get away from disagreeable or restraining neighbors, relatives and friends. Nevertheless the character of the New England migration as a whole was exceptional. It represented a high degree of enterprise, intelligence, virtue and heroic purpose. Moreover, it transplanted |