e empty forms of a mitred religion.

History can be read in secluded resting-places of the departed. With the
accretion of wealth to the living more care was expended upon the dead,
and enduring slabs of slate, with appropriate engravings, took the place
of the uncouth fragments of rock. With added riches the taste for display
in headstones, as well as in social life, increased, and imported marble
was occasionally used to designate the tombs of prosperous descendants of
the early and impoverished settlers. Not infrequently all three--the
unlettered stone of the first hundred years, the slate of the latter half
of the last century, and the polished and costly marble now so common in
the great public cemeteries--may be seen in one small burying-ground,
bearing mute testimony to the struggles and progress of the occupants.

* * *

It is a fact which bears striking testimony to the masterful qualities of
the native American character that in the Western States, notwithstanding
a vast foreign immigration, the dominant element is of the old colonial
stock. The fortunes of the West are guided by emigrants and the
descendants of emigrants from New England, the Middle and the border
States, and while adopted citizens, nearly all of a desirable class, are
in a majority in many parts of the West, most of the western men and
women also, of national fame, can trace an American pedigree for several
generations. There are notable exceptions to this rule, but they only
illustrate the rule. This condition is due not to any inferiority on the
part of the immigrant population to the average of European
nationalities--for, barring Russia and some southern countries we receive
the cream of European manhood--but to American heredity, to the
inheritance of those endowments which qualify for leadership in a nation
of freemen. The western American is more aggressive and progressive than
his eastern cousin. Just as the New Englander retains many of the
expressions and some of the ways which have become obsolete in Old
England, so the native settler of Kansas, of Iowa, of Nebraska, and even
of the nearer States of Ohio and Illinois, is more like the New Englander
of half a century ago than those who have remained on the ancestral soil.
He has the old Puritan love of learning, and from the humble colleges in
which his more ambitious children are educated go forth the Joshuas and
the Davids of our America