They hesitated to throw
themselves with hearty enthusiasm into the task of building a nation
with a continent as its base. They rather shrank from the idea as
implying a lesser weight of their own section in the nation; not yet
understanding that to an American the essential thing was the growth and
well-being of America, while the relative importance of the locality
where he dwelt was a matter of small moment.

Eastern Efforts to Shear the West's Strength.

The extreme representatives of this northeastern sectionalism not only
objected to the growth of the West at the time now under consideration,
but even avowed a desire to work it harm, by shutting the Mississippi,
so as to benefit the commerce of the Atlantic States--a manifestation of
cynical and selfish disregard of the rights of their fellow-countrymen
quite as flagrant as any piece of tyranny committed or proposed by King
George's ministers in reference to America. These intolerant extremists
not only opposed the admission of the young western States into the
Union, but at a later date actually announced that the annexation by the
United States of vast territories beyond the Mississippi offered just
cause for the secession of the northeastern States. Even those who did
not take such an advanced ground felt an unreasonable dread lest the
West might grow to overtop the East in power. In their desire to prevent
this (which has long since happened without a particle of damage
resulting to the East), they proposed to establish in the Constitution
that the representatives from the West should never exceed in number
those from the East,--a proviso which would not have been merely futile,
for it would quite properly have been regarded by the West as
unforgivable.

A curious feature of the way many honest men looked at the West was
their inability to see how essentially transient were some of the
characteristics to which they objected. Thus they were alarmed at the
turbulence and the lawless shortcomings of various kinds which grew out
of the conditions of frontier settlement and sparse population. They
looked with anxious foreboding to the time when the turbulent and
lawless people would be very numerous, and would form a dense and
powerful population; failing to see that in exact proportion as the
population became dense, the conditions which caused the qualities to
which they objected would disappear. Even the men who had too much good
sense to share these fea