ich have so much influence in
creating a diversity of rank in society. These circumstances have laid
the foundation for that equality of intercourse, simplicity of manners,
want of deference, want of reserve, great readiness to make
acquaintances, freedom of speech, indisposition to brook real or
imaginary insults which one witnesses among people of the West."

This equality, this independence, this rudeness so often described by
the traveler as marking a new country, were all accentuated by the
character of the settlers themselves. Traces of the fierce, unsociable,
eagle-eyed, hard-drinking hunter remained. The settlers who followed the
hunter were, with some exceptions, soldiers of the Revolutionary army,
farmers of the "middling order," and mechanics from the towns,--English,
Scotch-Irish, Germans,--poor in possessions and thrown upon the labor of
their own hands for support. Sons and daughters from well-to-do Eastern
homes sometimes brought softer manners; but the equality of life and the
leveling force of labor in forest and field soon made them one in spirit
with their struggling neighbors. Even the preachers and teachers, who
came when the cabins were raised in the clearings and rude churches and
schoolhouses were built, preached sermons and taught lessons that
savored of the frontier, as any one may know who reads Peter
Cartwright's _A Muscular Christian_ or Eggleston's _The Hoosier
Schoolmaster_.

THE WEST AND THE EAST MEET

=The East Alarmed.=--A people so independent as the Westerners and so
attached to local self-government gave the conservative East many a rude
shock, setting gentlemen in powdered wigs and knee breeches agog with
the idea that terrible things might happen in the Mississippi Valley.
Not without good grounds did Washington fear that "a touch of a feather
would turn" the Western settlers away from the seaboard to the
Spaniards; and seriously did he urge the East not to neglect them, lest
they be "drawn into the arms of, or be dependent upon foreigners."
Taking advantage of the restless spirit in the Southwest, Aaron Burr,
having disgraced himself by killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, laid
wild plans, if not to bring about a secession in that region, at least
to build a state of some kind out of the Spanish dominions adjoining
Louisiana. Frightened at such enterprises and fearing the dominance of
the West, the Federalists, with a few conspicuous exceptions, opposed
equality between the