rs, even men as broadly patriotic as Jay, could
not realize the extreme rapidity of western growth. Kentucky and
Tennessee grew much faster than any of the old frontier colonies had
ever grown; and from sheer lack of experience, eastern statesmen could
not realize that this rapidity of growth made the navigation of the
Mississippi a matter of immediate and not of future interest to the
West.

Failure to Perceive Truths Now Regarded as Self-Evident.

In short, these good people were learning with reluctance and difficulty
to accept as necessary certain facts which we regard as part of the
order of our political nature. We look at territorial expansion, and the
admission of new States, as part of a process as natural as it is
desirable. To our forefathers the process was novel, and, in some of its
features, repugnant. Many of them could not divest themselves of the
feeling that the old States ought to receive more consideration than the
new; whereas nowadays it would never occur to anyone that Pennsylvania
and Georgia ought to stand either above or below California and Montana.
It is an inestimable boon to all four States to be in the Union, but
this is because the citizens of all of them are on a common footing. If
the new commonwealths in the Rocky Mountains and on the Pacific slope
were not cordially accepted by the original Thirteen States as having
exactly the same rights and privileges of every kind, it would be better
for them to stand alone. As a matter of fact, we have become so
accustomed to the idea of the equality of the different States, that it
never enters our heads to conceive of the possibility of its being
otherwise. The feeling in its favor is so genuine and universal that we
are not even conscious that it exists. Nobody dreams of treating the
fact that the new commonwealths are offshoots of the old as furnishing
grounds for any discrimination in reference to them, one way or the
other. There still exist dying jealousies between different States and
sections, but this particular feeling does not enter into them in any
way whatsoever.

The East Distrusts the Trans-Alleghany People.

At the time when Kentucky was struggling for statehood, this feeling,
though it had been given its death-blow by the success of the
Revolution, still lingered here and there on the Atlantic coast. It was
manifest in the attitude of many prominent people--the leaders in their
communities--towards the new commonweal